with him. "Fiat justitia, ruat coelum." "Si fractus illabatur orbis
Impavidum ferient ruinae." At another he will see the necessity of a
compromise for the good of the many. He will tell himself that if the
best cannot be done, he must content himself with the next best.
He must shake hands with the imperfect, as the best way of lifting
himself up from a bad way toward a better. In obedience to his very
conscience he will temporize, and, finding no other way of achieving
good, will do even evil that good may come of it. "Rem si possis
recte; si non, quocunque modo rem." In judging of such a character as
this, a hard and fast line will certainly lead us astray. In judging
of Cicero, such a hard and fast line has too generally been used. He
was a man singularly sensitive to all influences. It must be admitted
that he was a vane, turning on a pivot finer than those on which
statesmen have generally been made to work. He had none of the fixed
purpose of Caesar, or the unflinching principle of Cato. They were men
cased in brass, whose feelings nothing could hurt. They suffered from
none of those inward flutterings of the heart, doubtful aspirations,
human longings, sharp sympathies, dreams of something better than
this world, fears of something worse, which make Cicero so like a
well-bred, polished gentleman of the present day. It is because he
has so little like a Roman that he is of all the Romans the most
attractive.

Still there may be doubt whether, with all the intricacies of his
character, his career was such as to justify a further biography at
this distance of time. "What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?" asks
Hamlet, when he finds himself stirred by the passion thrown into the
bare recital of an old story by an itinerant player. What is Cicero to
us of the nineteenth century that we should care so much for him as to
read yet another book? Nevertheless, Hamlet was moved because the tale