In his rhetorical works, Cicero left a legacy of practical instruction to posterity. The treatise “_De Inventione_,” although it displays genius, is merely interesting as the juvenile production of a future great man; and the author himself alludes to it as a rude and unfinished production.[828] Of the Rhetorical Hand-Book, in four sections, addressed to Herennius, it is unnecessary to speak, as it is now universally pronounced spurious.[829] The _De Oratore_, _Brutus sive de claris Oratoribus_, and _Orator ad M. Brutum_,[830] are the result of his matured experience. They form together one series; the principles are first laid down; their developments are carried out and illustrated; and lastly, in the _Orator_, he places before the eyes of Brutus the model of ideal perfection. In his treatment of this subject, he shows a mind imbued with the spirit of Plato: he invests it with dramatic interest, and transports the reader into the scene which he so graphically describes. The conversation contained in the first of these works has been already described. The scene of the second is laid on the lawn of Cicero’s palace at Rome: Cicero, Atticus and M. Brutus are the _dramatis personæ_; and their taste receives inspiration from a statue of Plato which adorns the garden. In the third, Cicero himself, at the request of M. Brutus, paints, as Plato would have done, the portrait of a faultless orator. Three more short treatises must be added—(1.) The dialogue, _De Partitione Oratoria_,[831] an elementary book, written for his son. (2.) The _De Optimo Genere Oratorum_,[832] a short preface to a translation of the Greek oration, _De Corona_. (3.) The _Topica_,[833] _i. e._, a treatise on the commonplaces of judicial oratory. PHILOSOPHY OF CICERO. Cicero somewhat arrogantly claims the credit of being the first to awaken a taste for philosophy, and to illuminate the darkness in which it lay hid by the light of Roman letters.[834] He did not confess the obligations under which he lay to his predecessors, because he never could forget that he was an orator.[835] He could not deny that some of them thought justly; but he denied that they possessed the power of expressing what they thought. He felt that there was nothing in the philosophical writings already existing to tempt his countrymen to study the subject: they were dry, unadorned, unpolished. It required an orator to array philosophy in an enticing garb. He proposed, therefore, to assuage his anxieties—to seek repose from the harassing cares of politics[836]—by rendering his countrymen independent of Greek philosophical literature.