to us that an African prince should not be as perfectly dressed as
a young man in Piccadilly. But, when we make a comparison of morals
between our own time and a period before Christ, we seem to forget
that more should be expected from us than from those who lived two
thousand years ago.

There are some of those pleadings, speeches made by Cicero on behalf
of or against an accused party, from which we may learn more of Roman
life than from any other source left to us. Much we may gather from
Terence, much from Horace, something from Juvenal. There is hardly,
indeed, a Latin author from which an attentive reader may not pick up
some detail of Roman customs. Cicero's letters are themselves very
prolific. But the pretty things of the poets are not quite facts, nor
are the bitter things of the satirist; and though a man's letters to
his friend may be true, such letters as come to us will have been the
products of the greater minds, and will have come from a small and
special class. I fear that the Newgate Calendar of the day would tell
us more of the ways of living then prevailing than the letters of Lady
Mary W. Montagu or of Horace Walpole. From the orations against
Verres we learn how the people of a province lived under the tyranny
inflicted upon them; and from those spoken in defence of Sextus
Amerinus and Aulus Cluentius, we gather something of the horrors
of Roman life--not in Rome, indeed, but within the limits of Roman
citizenship.

It is, however, as a man of letters that Cicero will be held in the
highest esteem. It has been his good-fortune to have a great part of
what he wrote preserved for future ages. His works have not perished,
as have those of his contemporaries, Varro and Hortensius. But this
has been due to two causes, which were independent of Fortune.