I have only to supply the words, and of them I have plenty,' --but which are quite unrivalled as literary feats.

'If we were required,' writes Mr. Strachan-Davidson, 'to decide what ancient writings have most directly influenced the modern world, the award must probably go in favour of Plutarch's Lives and of the philosophic works of Cicero.'

It is not only their matchless charm of style which gives to these masterpieces their paramount place in literature. Without claiming for them philosophic insight or originality of speculation, qualities which Cicero himself expressly disclaims, we are bound to acknowledge to him an inestimable debt for the vast body of philosophic thought which he has preserved and embellished for us. One could not, of course, seek a system in these works. A watchmaker's shop is the worst place in which to look for the time of day. This, we suppose, is the ground on which Mommsen pronounces the philosophical work of Cicero a complete failure, adding, with 'Batavian grace'—

Anyone who seeks classical productions in works so written can only be advised to study in literary matters a becoming silence.' In other words, the world is to keep silence while the German savant bays at the splendid Moon which sheds on us so exquisitely the rays borrowed from the Sun of Greek philosophy.

6

His anguish for the death of Tullia was acute : he writes, My agony haunts me; not, God knows, because I foster it, but in spite of my struggles against it.'* His only comfort is the thought of the shrine which he has vowed to consecrate to her memory, and the reflection that

'the long ages when I shall be no more are more important in my eyes than the brief span of present life, which indeed seems all too long.'

This beautiful sentiment, found also in Sophocles,† is the motto of George Eliot's poem, 'Oh may I join the choir invisible !' His divorced wife, Terentia, seems to have been harassing him with proposals about some pecuniary transaction which he does not consider sincere. On this subject he finely writes to Atticus, Let the first consideration be what my duty demands. If it proves to be a bad bargain for me, I should rather have to feel dissatisfied with her for overreaching me than with myself for any neglect of duty on my own part.' The divorce

Att. xii. 13. Here again the editors insert a non, and ascribe to Cicero a sentiment the very opposite to that which the MSS., our only evidence, present to us-a sentiment inconsistent, too, with other letters of this period.

† Antigone, 74; Att. xii. 18.

of

of Publilia, the extravagance of his son at Athens under the tutorship of Gorgias, who seems to have been an ancient Dr. Pangloss, and, above all, the unkindness of his brother and nephew, who are seeking to influence Cæsar against him, fill the cup of his affliction. Yet of his son he writes in the most fatherly manner. He owns that he does not quite believe the favourable reports of Herodes and other hungry Greek professors, but he adds frankly, 'In a matter like this I readily allow myself to be imposed upon, and find a pleasure in my own gullibility.' Of young Quintus he speaks most bitterly 'our ruffianly kinsman.' In fact, the project of deifying his daughter and his literary activities are the only solace of his 'life's downward slope.' His indifference to money matters is a very graceful trait in his character :

as

'I am more vexed that (through Tullia's death and the misconduct of Marcus) I have no one to leave anything to than that I have really nothing to spend.'

He constantly asserts his indifference to the minor vexations of life. He receives the news of the fall of two houses belonging to him and the insecure condition of others with the words, Many call such things misfortunes; to me they are hardly even inconveniences.' He alludes with a jest to the difficulty of recovering Tullia's dower from Dolabella.

'Yes; Dolabella is acting well. A score for him! I wish he could be got to think of the score he has got to settle with me.'

Cicero, with the intellect of a man, had the heart of a child. He could not bear to be, in the child's phrase, ' out with' anyone. He would sacrifice some of those feelings which we miscall manly rather than endure that aloofness from natural friends, the sting of which was felt by Coleridge when he wrote the immortal lines:

son.

'And to be wroth with one we love

Doth work like madness in the brain.'

Hence his noble forgiveness of Quintus and his wretched Hence even his complaisance towards Dolabella, who had rendered miserable the last years of the life of Tullia, the creature on whom Cicero poured out all the riches of his loving heart. We cannot but feel surprised to find Cicero quite cordial with the man whom his daughter had at last been compelled to divorce after repeated provocations patiently endured. In Rome the marriage bond held no sanctity, and hardly even gathered round it tender associations. This is, according to some of our modern novelists, a consummation

devoutly

devoutly to be wished.' When we find Cicero, who was so much superior to his contemporaries in refinement, divorcing Terentia on no very positive grounds; contemplating a match with the ugliest woman I ever saw'; marrying Publilia, who might have been his granddaughter; almost immediately divorcing her, and living on friendly terms with the divorced husband of his beloved Tulliola, we are enabled to judge how baneful the old Roman attitude towards marriage would be to the rank and file of modern humanity. A short letter to Atticus on the death of a favourite slave or freedman in his friend's household, puts in a strong light Cicero's gentleness of disposition:

'Poor Athamas! My dear Atticus, your grief is natural, but you must struggle against it. Let philosophy bring about the result that time must effect. Now let us take care of your other slave, Alexis, who is sick at your house in Rome. Is the Quirinal insanitary? If so, you must send him and Tisamenus, who is in charge of him, to my house. The whole upper part is empty, as you know. The change might, I think, have a decided effect.'

It is interesting to observe the deep interest which Cicero takes in questions of diction and style. We are told by Quintilian that he was a severe critic of his son's Latinity, which indeed called for animadversion, if it is true, as Servius tells us on Æn. viii. 168, that young Cicero once wrote direxi litteras duas, a sentence which must have grieved his 'judicious father. It has been observed that Cicero reminds one of a modern Englishman more than any other character in so-called ancient history. He might have written this passage from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, except that his language would have been less severe :

'I come now to another part of your letter, which is the orthography, if I may call bad spelling orthography. You spell induce enduce, and grandeur you spell grandure, two faults which few of my housemaids would have been guilty of. Orthography is so necessary for a gentleman that one false spelling may fix a ridicule upon him for the rest of his life.'

It is not only to his son that he plays the censor. The most striking example of his purism about words occurs in a letter to Atticus. He needed a Latin word to represent éπox in the philosophic sense of the suspension of judgment. He had hit on sustinere, but Atticus had suggested inhibere, with which at first he was delighted; afterwards he writes:

* Duas should of course have been binas, and dirigere, 'to draw up,' can be paralleled only in late Latin.

'Now

Now I do not like it at all. Inhibere is a nautical expression, but I thought it meant to lie on the oars and keep the vessel stationary. I learned that I was wrong when a ship put in yesterday here at Astura. Inhibere does not mean to keep the vessel stationary, but to row backwards, which is quite unsuitable to illustrate the meaning of philosophic suspense in the Academica.'

He then goes on to give authority for the use of sustinere, which he wishes to be restored, and finally remarks:

'You see how much more interest I take in the exact meaning of inhibere and sustinere than in the political news, than in the career of Pollio in Spain, and, certainly, than in the news about Metellus and Balbinus.'

6

Cæsar could forgive his enemies, especially those who used against him only the sword and not the pen. But his clemency, not always based on the noblest motives, has been much exagge rated. Gaul was the scene of terrible acts of retribution. He executed the whole Senate of the Veneti; he permitted a massacre of the Usipetes and Tencteri; he sold as slaves 40,000 natives of Genabum, and cut the right hands off all the brave men whose only crime was that they held to the last against him their town Uxellodunum. Bacon quotes the desperate saying of Cosmus, Duke of Florence,' that though we are commanded to forgive our enemies, it is nowhere enjoined on us to forgive our friends. Cicero, as we have seen, could pardon even his friends. When his blackguard kinsman,' young Quintus, had grace enough to tell his uncle that he felt keenly the estrangement between them, Cicero replied at once with exquisite kindness, 'Why then do you permit the estrangement to exist?' adding, I use the word pateris in preference to committis,' which would have meant,Why do you bring on yourself his anger?' and indeed would have been none too hard. At the beginning of the epoch which we have been considering, in April 46, Cicero wrote to his learned friend Varro, words which neatly sum up his view of the way in which men, such as they were, should get through the troublous times on which they fell:

Be it ours to adhere firmly to a life of study, a practice once essential to my happiness, but now essential to my existence; to be ready to come, ay and eager to run, to help in building up the constitution, if called to that task, whether as master-builders or even only as common masons; if not wanted, to write and read about the science of politics, and from our study, if the Senate and Forum are closed to us, to do our best to guide the destinies of the State.'

ART.

ART. V.-Queen Elizabeth.

THE

By Mandell Creighton, D.D., Bishop of Peterborough. London, 1896.

HERE is no period of English history so enveloped in an atmosphere of sentiment and romance as that of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The triumphs of her rule in politics and war, the splendid services of unrivalled statesmen and warriors, the gay galaxy of wits, courtiers, poets, and dramatists that adorned her reign, arouse the interest and quicken the imagination of the student of the history and literature of England. She was great Gloriana,' the object of a unique chivalrous devotion when the spirit of chivalry had begun to fade, who moved through her Court like a goddess, setting an example of fashion and extravagance which her admiring courtiers only too rapidly followed, and which she at times found it necessary summarily to check. From shire to shire she would pass in triumphal procession in a whirl of shows, while 300 waggons followed with bag and baggage necessary for her domestic comfort, and a smutty regiment who attended the progresses rode in the cars with the pots and kettles, which, with every other article of furniture, were then moved from palace to palace.' Fauns and satyrs fled before her as she rode through the woods, and Diana and her train received her in a masque returning from the chase. Cupid presented her his golden shaft as she passed through the gates of Norwich; and the mythological deities and heroes of Greece and Rome, and the denizens of the New World, mingled in a strange medley with the chivalry of the Middle Ages in the stately courts of Kenilworth.

It is fitting that an age so brilliant, and a personality so striking, should be illustrated with all the splendour that the taste and art of the ninteenth century can command. To say that a book is worthy of the reign of Elizabeth is to give high praise. But we may say it with truth of the volume which we have placed at the head of our article. Throughout its pages Dr. Creighton bears his train of learning with a skill and ease which would not disgrace the most practised of courtiers. In it publisher, artist, and printer vie with one another to produce a work which shall rival the magnificence of the age of Elizabeth. The result is one of the most sumptuous volumes which have ever been published. Different readers will read it for different reasons. For ourselves, in the present article, it is a storehouse of fashions, a wardrobe of the richest costumes which the wealth and fancy of the Elizabethans could devise. The age was one of pageantry and show, pomp and glitter, as well as an age rich in ideas, when the mind of man, freed from the trammels

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