was well told. There is matter in the earnestness, the pleasantness,
the patriotism, and the tragedy of the man's life to move a reader
still--if the story could only be written of him as it is felt! The
difficulty lies in that, and not in the nature of the story.

The period of Cicero's life was the very turning-point of civilization
and government in the history of the world. At that period of time the
world, as we know it, was Rome. Greece had sunk. The Macedonian Empire
had been destroyed. The kingdoms of the East--whether conquered,
or even when conquering, as was Parthia for awhile--were barbaric,
outside the circle of cultivation, and to be brought into it only
by the arms and influence of Rome. During Caesar's career Gaul was
conquered; and Britain, with what was known of Germany, supposed to
be partly conquered. The subjugation of Africa and Spain was all but
completed. Letters, too, had been or were being introduced. Cicero's
use of language was so perfect that it seems to us to have been almost
necessarily the result of a long established art of Latin literature.
But, in truth, he is the earliest of the prose writers of his country
with whose works we are familiar. Excepting Varro, who was born but
ten years before him, no earlier Latin prose writer has left more than
a name to us; and the one work by which Varro is at all known, the
De Re Rustica, was written after Cicero's death. Lucretius, whose
language we regard as almost archaic, so unlike is it to that of
Virgil or Horace, was born eight years after Cicero. In a great degree
Cicero formed the Latin language--or produced that manipulation of it
which has made it so graceful in prose, and so powerful a vehicle
of thought. That which he took from any Latin writer he took from
Terence.

And it was then, just then, that there arose in Rome that