is felt by all who traverse the great circumstantial record of those tumultuous Roman times, viz. the Ciceronian epistolary correspondence. Upon coming suddenly into deep lulls of angry passions-here, upon some scheme for the extension of literature by a domestic history, or by a comparison of Greek with Roman jurisprudence; there, again, upon some ancient problem from the quiet fields of philosophy-literary men are already prejudiced in favour of one who, in the midst of belligerent partisans, was the patron of intellectual interest. But amongst Christian nations this prejudice has struck deeper: Cicero was not merely a philosophier; he was one who cultivated ethics; he was himself the author of an ethical system, composed with the pious purpose of training to what he thought just moral views his only son. This system survives, is studied to this day, is honoured perhaps extravagantly, and has repeatedly been pronounced the best practical theory to which pagan principles were equal. Were it only upon this impulse, it was natural that men should receive a clinamen, or silent bias, towards Cicero, as a moral authority amongst disputants whose arguments were legions. The author of a moral code cannot be supposed indifferent to the moral relations of his own party views. If he erred, it could not be through want of meditation upon the grounds of judgment, or want of interest in the results. So far Cicero has an advantage. But he has more lively advantage in the comparison by which he benefits, at every stage of his life, with antagonists whom the reader is taught to believe dissolute, incendiary, almost desperate citizens. Verres in the youth of Cicero, Catiline and Clodius in his middle age, Mark Antony in his old age, have all been left to operate on the modern reader's feelings precisely through that masquerade of misrepresentation which invariably accompanied the political eloquence of Rome. The monstrous caricatures from the forum, or the senate, or the democratic rostrum, which were so confessedly distortions, by original design, for attaining the ends of faction, have imposed upon scholars pretty generally as faithful portraits. Recluse scholars are rarely politicians; and in the timid horror of German literati at this day, when they read of real brickbats and paving

stones, not metaphorical, used as figures of speech by a Clodian mob, we British understand the little comprehension of that rough horseplay proper to the hustings, which can yet be available for the rectification of any continental judgment. "Play, do you call it?" says a German commentator; "why, that brickbat might break a man's leg; and this paving-stone would be sufficient to fracture a skull." Too true: they certainly might do so. But, for all that, our British experience of electioneering "rough-and-tumbling" has long blunted the edge of our moral anger. Contested elections are unknown to the continent-hitherto even to those nations of the continent which boast of representative governments. And with no experience of their inconveniences, they have as yet none of the popular forces in which such contests originate. We, on the other hand, are familiar with such scenes. What Rome saw upon one sole hustings, we see repeated upon hundreds. And we all know, that the bark of electioneering mobs is worse than their bite. Their fury is without malice, and their insurrectionary violence is without system. Most undoubtedly the mobs and seditions of Clodius are entitled to the same benefits of construction. And with regard to the graver charges against Catiline or Clodius, as men sunk irredeemably in sensual debaucheries, these are exaggerations which have told only from want of attention to Roman habits. Such charges were the standing material, the stock in trade, of every orator against every antagonist. Čicero, with the same levity as every other public speaker, tossed about such atrocious libels at random. And with little blame where there was really no discretion allowed. Not are they true? but will they tell? was the question. Insolvency and monstrous debauchery were the two ordinary reproaches on the Roman hustings. No man escaped them who was rich enough, or had expectations notorious enough, to win for such charges any colourable plausibility. Those only were unmolested in this way who stood in no man's path of ambition; or who had been obscure (that is to say, poor) in youth; or who, being splendid by birth or connexions, had been notoriously occupied in distant campaigns. The ob

similar arts of falsification. Eventually this has been his misfortune. Adhering to the truth, his indiscreet eulogists would have presented to the world a much more interesting picture; not so much the representation of "vir bonus cum malâ fortunâ compositus," which is, after all, an ordinary spectacle for so much of the conflict as can ever be made public; but that of a man generally upright, matched as in single duel with a standing temptation to error, growing out of his public position; often seduced into false principles by the necessities of ambition, or by the coercion of self-consistency; and often, as he himself admits, biassed finally in a public question by the partialities of friendship. The violence of that crisis was overwhelming to all moral sensibilities: no sense, no organ, remained true to the obligations of political justice principles and feelings were alike darkened by the extremities of the political quarrel: the feelings obeyed the personal engagements: and the principles indicated only the position of the individual-as between the senate struggling for interests and the democracy struggling for rights.

So far nothing has happened to Cicero which does not happen to all men entangled in political feuds. There are few cases of large party dispute which do not admit of contradictory delineations, as the mind is previously swayed to this extreme or to that. But the peculiarity in the case of Cicero is-not that he has be nefited by the mixed quality or the doubtfulness of that cause which he adopted, but that the very dubious character of the cause has benefited by him. Usually it happens, that the individual partisan is sheltered under the authority of his cause. But here the whole merits of the cause have been predetermined and adjudged by the

authority of the partizan. Had Cicero been absent, or had Cicero prac. tised that neutrality to which he often inclined, the general verdict of posterity on the great Roman civil war would have been essentially different from that which we find in history. At present the error is an extreme one; and we call it such without hesitation, because it has maintained itself by imperfect reading, even of such documents as survive, and by too general an oblivion of the important fact, that these surviving documents (meaning the contemporary documents) are pretty nearly all ex parte.*

To judge of the general equity in the treatment of Cicero considered as a political partisan, let us turn to the most current of the regular biographies. Amongst the infinity of slighter sketches, which naturally draw for their materials upon those which are most elaborate, it would be useless to confer a special notice upon any. We will cite the two which at this moment stand foremost in European literature

that of Conyers Middleton, now about one century old, as the memoir most generally read; that of Bernhard Abeken,† (amongst that limited class of memoirs which build upon any political principles,) accidentally the latest.

Conyers Middleton is a name that cannot be mentioned without an expression of disgust. We sit down in perfect charity, at the same table, with sceptics in every degree. To us, simply in his social character, and supposing him sincere, a sceptic is as agreeable as another. Anyhow he is better than a craniologist, than a punster, than a St Simonian, than a Jeremy- Bentham-cock, or an anticorn-law lecturer. What signifies a name? Free-thinker he calls himself? Good-let him "free-think" as fast as he can; but let him obey the ordinary laws of good faith. No sneering,

in the first place, because, though it is untrue that "a sneer cannot be answered," the answer too often imposes circumlocution. And upon a subject which makes wise men grave, a sneer argues so much perversion of heart, that it cannot be thought uncandid to infer some corresponding perversion of intellect. Perfect sincerity never existed in a professional sneerer. Secondly, no treachery, no betrayal of the cause which the man is sworn and paid to support. Conyers Middleton held considerable preferment in the church of England. Long after he had become an enemy to that church, (not separately for itself, but generally as a strong form of Christianity,) he continued to receive large quarterly cheques upon a bank in Lombard Street, of which the original condition had been, that he should defend Christianity "with all his soul, and with all his strength." Yet such was his perfidy to this sacred engagement, that even his private or personal feuds grew out of his capital feud with the Christian faith. From the church he drew his bread: and the labour of his life was to bring the church into contempt. He hated Bentley, he hated Warburton, he hated Waterland; and why? all alike as powerful champions of that religion which he himself daily betrayed; and Waterland, as the strongest of these champions, he hated most. But all these bye-currents of malignity emptied themselves into one vast cloaca maxima of rancorous animosity to the mere spirit, temper, and tendencies, of Christianity. Even in treason there is room for courage; but Middleton, in the manner, was as cowardly as he was treacherous in the matter. He wished to have it whispered about that he was worse than he seemed, and that he would be a fort esprit of a high cast, but for the bigotry of his church. It was a fine thing, he fancied, to have the credit of infidelity, without paying for a license; to sport over those manors without a qualification. As a scholar, meantime, he was trivial and incapable of labour. Even the Roman antiquities, political

or juristic, he had studied neither by research and erudition, nor by meditation on their value and analogies. Lastly, his English style, for which at one time he obtained some credit through the caprice of a fashionable critic, is such, that by weeding away from it whatever is colloquial, you would strip it of all that is characteristic; removing its idiomatic vulgarisms, you would remove its principle of animation.

On the

That man misapprehends the case, who fancies that the infidelity of Middleton can have but a limited operation upon a memoir of Cicero. contrary, because this prepossession was rather a passion of hatred* than any aversion of the intellect, it operated as a false bias universally; and in default of any sufficient analogy between Roman politics, and the politics of England at Middleton's time of publication, there was no other popuĨar bias derived from modern ages which could have been available. It was the object of Middleton to paint, in the person of Cicero, a pure Pagan model of scrupulous morality; and to show that, in most difficult times, he had acted with a self-restraint and a considerate integrity to which Christian ethics could have added no element of value. Now this object had the effect of, already in the preconception, laying a restraint over all freedom in the execution. No man could start from the assumption of Cicero's uniform uprightness, and afterwards retain any latitude of free judgment upon the most momentous transaction of Cicero's life: because, unless some plausible hypothesis could be framed for giving body and consistency to the pretences of the Pompeian cause, it must, upon any examination, turn out to have been as merely a selfish cabal, for the benefit of a few lordly families, as ever yet has prompted a conspiracy. The slang words "respublica" and "causa," are caught up by Middleton from the letters of Cicero; but never, in any one instance, has either Cicero or a modern commentator, been able to explain what general interest of the

Roman people was represented by these vague abstractions. The strife, at that era, was not between the conservative instinct as organized in the upper classes, and the destroying instinct as concentrated in the lowest. The strife was not between the property of the nation and its rapacious pauperism-the strife was not between the honours, titles, institutions, created by the state, and the plebeian malice of levellers, seeking for a commence'ment de novo, with the benefits of a general scramble-it was a strife between a small faction of confederated oligarchs upon the one hand, and the nation upon the other. Or, looking still more narrowly into the nature of the separate purposes at issue, it was, on the Julian side, an attempt to make such a redistribution of constitutional functions, as should harmonize the necessities of the public service with the working of the republican machinery. Whereas, under the existing condition of Rome, through the silent changes of time operating upon the relations of property and upon the character of the populace, it had been long evident that armed supportersnow legionary soldiers, now gladiators enormous bribery, and the constant reserve of anarchy in the rear, were become the regular counters for conducting the desperate game of the mere ordinary civil administration. Not the demagogue only, but the peaceful or patriotic citizen, and the constitutional magistrate, could now move and exercise their public functions only through the deadliest combinations of violence and fraud. This dreadful condition of things, which no longer acted through that salutary opposition of parties essential to the energy of free countries, but involved all Rome in a permanent panic, was acceptable to the senate only; and of the senate, in sincerity, to a very small section. Some score of great houses there was, that by vigilance of intrigues, by far-sighted arrangements for armed force or for critical retreat, and by overwhelming command of money, could always guarantee their own domination. For this purpose

all that they needed was a secret understanding with each other, and the interchange of mutual pledges by means of marriage alliances. Any revolution which should put an end to this anarchy of selfishness, must reduce the exorbitant power of the paramount grandees. They naturally confederated against a result so shocking to their pride. Cicero, as a new member of this faction, himself rich* in a degree sufficient for the indefinite aggrandizement of his son, and sure of support from all the interior cabal of the sena. tors, had adopted their selfish sympathies. And it is probable enough that all changes in a system which worked so well for himself, to which also he had always looked up from his youngest days as the reward and haven of his toils, did seriously strike him as dreadful innovations. Names were now to be altered for the sake of things; forms for the sake of substances; this already gave some verbal power of delusion to the senatorial faction. And a prospect still more startling to them all, was the necessity, towards any restoration of the old republic, that some one eminent grandee should hold provisionally a dictatorial power during the period of transition.

Abeken, and it is honourable to him as a scholar of a section not conversant with politics, saw enough into the situation of Rome at that time, to be sure that Cicero was profoundly in error upon the capital point of the dispute; that is, in mistaking a cabal for the commonwealth, and the narrowest of intrigues for a public "cause.' Abeken, like an honest man, had sought for any national interest cloaked by the wordy pretences of Pompey, and he had found none. He had seen the necessity towards any regeneration of Rome, that Cæsar, or some leader pursuing the same objects, should be armed for a time with extraordinary power. In that way only had both Marius and Sylla, each in the same general circumstances, though with different feelings, been enabled to preserve Rome from total anarchy. We give Abeken's express words,