large by himself; and if he can so write that the world at large
shall care to read what is written, no other memoir will, perhaps,
be necessary. For myself I have never regretted those details of
Shakspeare's life which a Boswell of the time might have given us. But
Cicero's personality as a man of letters seems especially to require
elucidation. His letters lose their chief charm if the character of
the man be not known, and the incidents of his life. His essays
on rhetoric--the written lessons which he has left on the art of
oratory--are a running commentary on his own career as an orator. Most
of his speeches require for their understanding a knowledge of
the circumstances of his life. The treatises which we know as his
Philosophy--works which have been most wrongly represented by being
grouped under that name--can only be read with advantage by the light
of his own experience. There are two separate classes of his so-called
Philosophy, in describing which the word philosophy, if it be used at
all, must be made to bear two different senses. He handles in one set
of treatises, not, I think, with his happiest efforts, the teaching
of the old Greek schools. Such are the Tusculan Disquisitions, the
Academics, and the De Finibus. From reading these, without reference
to the idiosyncrasies of the writer, the student would be led to
believe that Cicero himself was a philosopher after that sort. But he
was, in truth, the last of men to lend his ears

"To those budge doctors of the stoic fur."

Cicero was a man thoroughly human in all his strength and all his
weakness. To sit apart from the world and be happy amid scorn,
poverty, and obscurity, with a mess of cabbage and a crust, absolutely
contented with abstract virtue, has probably been given to no man;
but of none has it been less within the reach than of Cicero. To