Inasmuch as I now, in contrast to those times, doubt that my
winged appeals would in any material degree have helped the cause
of the Magyars or the Scandinavians, I consider it fortunate that
they remained within the more private sphere of the manuscript.
I could not, however, on more formal occasions keep from
expressing myself in the impassioned spirit of my poetic
effusions, which meanwhile brought me nothing--from friends or
non-friends--but a questionable reward; the former greeted me as
peculiarly fitted for the unintentionally droll, and the latter
thought it in the highest degree strange that a young person in
my subordinate position could undertake to inquire into affairs
concerning which not even they themselves dared to entertain an
opinion. I owe it to truth to add that my conduct at various
times did not justify any great hope that society might count on
an increase in me of civic virtue, inasmuch as I also, with
epigrams and caricatures, fell out with many who had deserved
better of me and whose friendship I in reality prized.
Altogether,--while a great struggle raged on the outside, I
found myself on a war-footing with the little society where I
lived cramped by conditions and circumstances of life.

Such was the situation when amid the preparations for my
examinations I read through Sallust's _Catiline_ together
with Cicero's Catilinarian orations. I swallowed these
documents, and a few months later my drama was complete. As will
be seen from my book, I did not share at that time the conception
of the two ancient Roman writers respecting the character and
conduct of Catiline, and I am even now prone to believe that
there must after all have been something great and consequential
in a man whom Cicero, the assiduous counsel of the majority, did