By this plan and by popping out sometimes many times a day, sometimes after an interval of many days, he kept his underlings alert. My uncle's tastes in respect to books were as peculiar as in all other respects. He had a really magnificent library, including all the Greek poets, all our own, and other noble works of literature, such as the historians in both the Greek and Latin tongues; the orators, and the writers on painting, sculpture, architecture and music. But he paid more attention to his personal fads. He had a creditable collection of all works on divination, a similarly inclusive assemblage of works on the theory of government, and an almost complete array of the writings of the Emperors, from the Divine Julius to the Divine Aurelius, whose meditations he extolled. But he extolled above all other Princes and authors the Divine Julius. "Caius Julius Caesar," he was never tired of saying, "was, in all respects, the greatest man who ever lived on earth. He was also the greatest author earth has ever produced. His poems, his mimes, his comedies, his dramas, compare favorably with the best of their kind. His accounts of his wars, whether against the Gauls or against his domestic adversaries, are models of narration, of lucidity, of terseness and of style. His astronomy is the best manual of that subject in Latin. His works on Engineering surpass anything of their kind in clearness and preserve for the benefit of future generations more useful and original ideas than ever before came from the brain of any one man. His works on divination, particularly that on Auspices, excel everything previously written on that most important of all human arts. "But his two books against Cato are his masterpiece. It is wonderful that any man could have, in the space of eight days, written, with his own hand, so fiery an invective, so compelling of the attention of any reader, so completely annihilative of his antagonist's pretensions and contentions, so convincingly establishing his own: to have made of it, in the course of composition so rapid and totally unrevised, such a jewel of Latinity, in a style not only pure and impeccable, but glowing and charming, is astonishing. But it is downright miraculous that he should have embodied in it the whole theory of government with all its principles marshalled in their array with the most perfect subordination of considerations of lesser importance to main principles. The two Anticatones contain all that a ruler or any minister of a ruler need know to guide him aright in his tasks. The First Book displays a complete theory of internal policy, the Second of external policy. The two together form a whole which is the most brilliant product of Rome's literary and political genius."