"Cicero defended, without a blush, men more dishonorable, and incalculably more dangerous than Catiline!" Was this when he defended in the tribune Sicily against Verres, and the Roman republic against Antony? Was it when he exhorted the clemency of Cæsar in favor of Ligarius and King Deiotarus? or when he obtained the right of citizenship for the poet Archias? or when, in his exquisite oration for the Manilian law, he obtained every Roman suffrage on behalf of the great Pompey? He pleaded for Milo, the murderer of Clodius; but Clodius had deserved the tragical end he met with by his outrages. Clodius had been involved in the conspiracy of Catiline; Clodius was his mortal enemy. He had irritated Rome against him, and had punished him for having saved Rome. Milo was his friend. What! is it in our time that any one ventures to assert that God punished Cicero for having defended a military tribune called Popilius Lena, and that divine vengeance made this same Popilius Lena the instrument of his assassination? No one knows whether Popilius Lena was guilty of the crime of which he was acquitted, after Cicero's defence of him upon his trial; but all know that the monster was guilty of the most horrible ingratitude, the most infamous avarice, and the most detestable cruelty to obtain the money of three wretches like himself. It was reserved for our times to hold up the assassination of Cicero as an act of divine justice. The triumvirs would not have dared to do it. Every age, before the present, has detested and deplored the manner of his death. Cicero is reproached with too frequently boasting that he had saved Rome, and with being too fond of glory. But his enemies endeavored to stain his glory. A tyrannical faction condemned him to exile, and razed his house, because he had preserved every house in Rome from the flames which Catiline had prepared for them. Men are permitted and even bound to boast of their services, when they meet with forgetfulness or ingratitude, and more particularly when they are converted into crimes. Scipio is still admired for having answered his accusers in these words: "This is the anniversary of the day on which I vanquished Hannibal; let us go and return thanks to the gods." The whole assembly followed him to the Capitol, and our hearts follow him thither also, as we read the passage in history; though, after all, it would have been better to have delivered in his accounts than to extricate himself from the attack by a _bon mot_.