agree with me His intellect they have admitted, and his industry; but
his patriotism they have doubted, his sincerity they have disputed,
and his courage they have denied. It might have become me to have been
silenced by their verdict; but I have rather been instigated to appeal
to the public, and to ask them to agree with me against my friends. It
is not only that Cicero has touched all matters of interest to men,
and has given a new grace to all that he has touched; that as an
orator, a rhetorician, an essayist, and a correspondent he was
supreme; that as a statesman he was honest, as an advocate fearless,
and as a governor pure; that he was a man whose intellectual part
always dominated that of the body; that in taste he was excellent, in
thought both correct and enterprising, and that in language he
was perfect. All this has been already so said of him by other
biographers. Plutarch, who is as familiar to us as though he had been
English, and Middleton, who thoroughly loved his subject, and latterly
Mr. Forsyth, who has struggled to be honest to him, might have
sufficed as telling us so much as that. But there was a humanity in
Cicero, a something almost of Christianity, a stepping forward out of
the dead intellectualities of Roman life into moral perceptions, into
natural affections, into domesticity, philanthropy, and conscious
discharge of duty, which do not seem to have been as yet fully
appreciated. To have loved his neighbor as himself before the teaching
of Christ was much for a man to achieve; and that he did this is what
I claim for Cicero, and hope to bring home to the minds of those
who can find time for reading yet another added to the constantly
increasing volumes about Roman times.

It has been the habit of some latter writers, who have left to Cicero
his literary honors, to rob him of those which had been accorded
to him as a politician. Macaulay, expressing his surprise at the