'Bonnie John Seton' at the Brig o' Dee, and the burning of Towie by Edom o' Gordon, is not absent from the verses of Cadenhead and Norval Clyne. The learned Doctors of Aberdeen, the saintly John Forbes of Corse, Baronius noster,' William Lesly, Scroggie, Sibbald, and Ross, in whom fell more learning than was left behind in all Scotland besyde at that tyme, have had not unworthy successors in many a professor and alumnus of King's and Marischal Colleges. That power of presenting to us the real facts, the light and shade, and the subtler colours of Northern life which the old local annalists possessed, never was more conspicuous than in the late Dr. William Alexander's prose pictures of Aberdeenshire men and ways. That love for the past of their country, and anxiety to preserve the antiquities and the history of their own district, which was illustrated by Hector Boece, the first Principal of the University, whose too great credulity won for him the title of the Father of Lies, and in the seventeenth century was more creditably exhibited by old Spalding, by the 'Great Straloch,' by his son the Parson of Rothiemay, and by Patrick Gordon, kept alive in the labours of Ruddiman, has never blazed brighter than in the coterie of accomplished and accurate investigators of antiquities, Joseph Robertson, William Stuart, and John Grub, whose names are associated with the magnificent contributions to our knowledge of the past of Scotland made accessible by the Old Spalding Club. Aberdeen also points with pride to the wider achievements in the field of historical research of their contemporaries W. F. Skene and John Hill Burton.

That these honourable traditions are worthily carried on the publications of the New Spalding Club bear witness, and not least the Records of Aboyne, in which Lord Huntly tells carefully and concisely the story of his noble race, and the beautiful volume, rich in illustration and suggestive in commentary, which conveys to those who have never seen Aberdeen or breathed the bracing air of Mar the heraldic message of the Lacunar Basilica Sancti Macarii Aberdonensis.

ART.

ART. IV.-1. The Correspondence of Cicero during the years 46-44 B.C.

2. Der Briefwechsel des M. Tullius Cicero. Von Otto Eduard Schmidt. Leipzig, 1893.

3. M. Tulli Ciceronis Epistularum libri sedecim. Edidit Ludovicus Mendelssohn. Lipsiæ, 1893.

4. Cicéron et ses Amis. Par Gaston Boissier. Paris, 1877. 5. Cæsar, a Sketch. By J. A. Froude, M.A. London, 1888. 6. Cicero and the Fall of the Roman Republic. By J. L. Strachan-Davidson, M.A. New York and London, 1894. 7. Mommsen's History of Rome. Eng. Translation. London, 1877.

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HERE is a story of a schoolboy who was asked what he knew of the early history of Britain. His answer was, 'The island of Britain was inhabited by the Ancient Britons, who were savages until they were invaded by Julius Cæsar. He was a civilised man, a gentleman, and a Christian.' One would surmise that this little boy was fresh from a perusal of Froude's Cæsar, a Sketch,' but for the moderation which classed Cæsar with the followers of the Founder of Christianity, and not with the Founder himself. Of the many thousands who have read Froude's admirably written book, hundreds will have enjoyed the style without being misled by the false views of history advanced. The scholar will have seen that his study of the original documents has been neither wide nor accurate, while his conception of the world in which Cæsar lived is quite amazingly erroneous. Even he who is no scholar will notice how Froude has overdone the parallel between our own time and the closing years of the Roman Republic. He will see how misleading it is to speak of the Senate as 'noble lords' and the Equites as young lords,' and to write as if 'patrician and plebeian' were terms correlative with eachother in the same way as the terms 'rich' and 'poor,' But such is the brilliant literary power which Froude has brought to bear on the statement of his case for Cæsar and despotism and against Cicero and republicanism, that thousands of English readers of Roman history will, if uncautioned, accept the Sketch as a faithful picture of Cæsar and his times, and it will for a long time be incumbent on him who desires to place in their true light the actors in the last scenes of the Fall of the Roman Republic, to begin by endeavouring to remove those misconceptions which his brilliant essay has engendered. To our whole review we would prefix the observation that to reproduce an atmosphere is as difficult at least for the historian Vol. 184.-No. 368.

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as

as for the painter, that this faculty is even more indispensable in the historian than in the painter, and that when the historian deliberately neglects it he deserves to be neglected.

In the autumn of the year B.C. 46, Cicero delivered in the Senate a brilliant speech, which has come down to us, the pro Marcello. This Marcus Marcellus had been Consul in the year 51, and had taken a very active part against Cæsar. Among his enemies exiled after Pharsalia, there was not one whom Cæsar had greater reason to regard with feelings of vindictive indignation. Knowing that one of the strongest of Cæsar's political principles was the enfranchisement of the Transpadane Gauls,-nay, more, the theory that of right they were actually full Roman burgesses, Marcellus in his consulship had seized the opportunity of wounding him in his most sensitive part. A distinguished citizen of Como, one of the towns recently enfranchised by Cæsar, was staying in Rome. In the view of Cæsar this man was a full burgess of Rome, and as such enjoyed as complete an immunity from corporal punishment as the Consul himself. Marcellus had him publicly scourged. So much for Cæsar and his Transpadanes! After Pharsalia, Marcellus retired to Mitylene. Cicero, who was at this time leading a pleasant enough life in Rome, on terms of the closest intimacy with leading Cæsarians, such as Dolabella, Hirtius, and Pansa, to whom he was teaching declamation in return for their instruction in the art of dining, no doubt felt that there was an invidious contrast between his own lot and that of the exiled Optimate. He felt that while a great patrician, a consular and a devotee of republicanism, was living in obscurity in Mitylene, it looked awkward (aμoppov or σóλokov he himself would have called it) that he should pass a gay existence among the leading men of Rome. was almost essential to his dignity, even to his comfort, that Marcellus should be restored. But he encountered a very obstinate resistance in the staunch republican, who much preferred the freedom of Mitylene to an enslaved life in the metropolis. At last he obtained the consent of Marcellus to accept pardon if tendered to him. Cicero approached Cæsar, probably without much hope of success; but, to his infinite delight, found him ready to offer to his enemy a full pardon. This striking act of magnanimity broke down Cicero's resolution to hold his peace. Carried away by his enthusiasm in his first speech since Pharsalia, he gave a loose rein to his unbounded powers of panegyric in the oration pro Marcello. It is on this speech that Froude has based his fiercest attack on the character and motives of Cicero.

It

'Such,'

'Such,' he writes, was the speech delivered by Cicero in the Senate in Cæsar's presence within a few weeks of his murder.'

The speech was delivered in the autumn of 46, more than a year and a half before the deed, which was done on the Ides of March in the year 44. The sentiments of admiration for Cæsar and confidence in his patriotism, which Froude so scathingly contrasts with the language of the 2nd Philippic, written two years afterwards, were sincerely felt by Cicero when he delivered the speech. In his private correspondence, which he never intended to meet the eyes of anyone except his correspondent, the sentiment is in spirit the same, though of course the tone is that of a private letter, not of a public speech. Writing to his friend Servius Sulpicius immediately after the incident, he relates how Cæsar, after dwelling severely on the bitter spirit' (acerbitate) shown by Marcellus, declared that he would not allow his opinion about an individual to bring him into opposition to the declared will of the Senate.' Was it any wonder that Cicero interpreted such a statement as an official declaration that Cæsar intended to restore the republic, and had abandoned all thoughts of establishing a monarchy ?

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'You need not ask me,' he proceeds, what I thought of it. I saw in my mind's eye the Republic coming back to life. I had determined to hold my peace for ever; not, God knows, through apathy, but because I felt my former status in the House was lost beyond recall. But Cæsar's magnanimity and the Senate's loyalty swept away the barriers of my reserve.'

Froude gives copious extracts from this speech, which he represents as being at best a cowardly effort to curry favour with a conqueror, and which he hints was designed to lull Cæsar into a false security, and thus facilitate the assassination, which he supposes to have taken place in the course of a few weeks, but which really was perpetrated more than a year and a half afterwards. It is fortunately possible, chiefly by means of Cicero's correspondence, especially since the fruitful labours of Mendelssohn and Schmidt have arranged it so accurately in its chronological order, to trace the steps by which the sincere admiration of Cæsar's character expressed throughout the speech for Marcellus was converted into the feeling that produced the scream of delight at the assassination of Cæsar, preserved for us in that extraordinary little scribble to Basilus-the shortest letter extant to which we shall have occasion to recur. It may be premised that in making this attempt we shall have sometimes to advert to incidents and expressions which to a

careless reader of the correspondence might seem trivial. If we are right in thinking that the untrammelled utterances of a great thinker and an unrivalled littérateur, on events which passed under his eyes, and in which he took an important part, at a most critical period of the world's history, will always have a deep interest for English students of the past, we feel that no apology is needed for details, and that no reader will suggest, as Horatio did to Hamlet, that "Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.' And let it not be forgotten that in nearly every other case in literary history, to look for an author's mind in his letters as in a mirror would be to meet a reflection far too flattering. In Cicero's letters we find even a distorted image. Had he been dressing himself up as a figure for history, we can judge what a portrait he would have made. But in submitting himself to the judgment of his friends, and of them only, he laboured to put his case at the worst, and thus best to profit by their advice.

The speech of Cicero was not at the time regarded as overstrained. Even the uncompromising Marcellus himself, in thanking Cicero for his services to him, has not a word to say about undue praise of Cæsar. In the letter already quoted in which he describes the scene in the Senate to Servius Sulpicius, Cicero attributes the miserable condition of affairs at Rome 'not to the victor-nothing could surpass his moderation-but to the fact that there has been a victory, which, in civil warfare, cannot but be outrageous.' Writing to Cornificius probably about this time, Cicero refers to the celebrated incident of the humiliation of Laberius by Cæsar, which produced the manly protest of Laberius preserved by Macrobius, ending with the words:

'Certes, I've lived a day too long.'

The letter is interesting, because it puts the part which Cæsar took in a more amiable light than that in which we are accustomed to regard it. In recording the presence of Munatius Plancus, a bitter enemy of Cæsar, at the games, and the enforced appearance of Laberius as an actor in competition with Publilius Syrus, his cominent is:

'Peace prevails here, but one marked with incidents which would give you no pleasure if you were here, which indeed give no pleasure to Cæsar. That is the worst of civil wars. When they are over, the victor must not consult his own wishes merely, but must humour those to whom he owes his victory.'

"Nimirum hoc die

Uno plus vixi quam mihi vivendum fuit.'