praise of the Senate, his description of what it should be and might
be, I have given. To the other side of the picture we shall come soon,
when I shall have to show how, at the trial of Verres, he declared
before the judges themselves how terrible had been the corruption of
the judgment-seat in Rome since, by Sulla's enactment, it had been
occupied only by the Senators. One passage I will give now, in order
that the reader may see by the juxtaposition of the words that he
could denounce the Senate as loudly as he would vaunt its privileges.
In the column on the left hand in the note I quote the words with
which, in the first pleading against Verres, he declared "that every
base and iniquitous thing done on the judgment-seat during the ten
years since the power of judging had been transferred to the Senate
should be not only denounced by him, but also proved;" and in that on
the right I will repeat the noble phrases which he afterward used in
the speech for Cluentius when he chose to speak well of the order.[93]
Contra Verrem, Act. i, ca. xiii.: "Omnia non modo commemorabuntur,
sed etiam, expositis certis rebus, agentur, quae inter decem annos,
posteaquam judicia ad senatum translata sunt, in rebus judicandis
nefarie flagitioseque facta sunt."

It was on the Senate that they who wished well for Rome must
depend--on the Senate, chosen, refreshed, and replenished from among
the people; on a body which should be at the same time august
and popular--as far removed on the one side from the tyranny of
individuals as on the other from the violence of the mob; but on a
Senate freed from its corruption and dirt, on a body of noble Romans,
fitted by their individual character and high rank to rule and to
control their fellow-citizens. This was Cicero's idea, and this the
state of things which he endeavored to achieve. No doubt he dreamed
that his own eloquence and his own example might do more in producing