They crowded around him as the people did around Chrysostom in Antioch. He amused like an actor, and instructed like a sage. His sentences are not short, terse, epigrammatic, and direct, but elaborate and artificial. Yet with all his arts of eloquence his soul, fired with great sentiments, rose in its inspired fervor above even the melody of voice, the rhythm of language, and the vehemence of action. A listener, who was not a critic, might fancy it was gesture, voice, and language combined; but, after all, it was the _man_ communicating his soul to those who hung upon his lips, and securing conviction by his sincerity and appeals to conscience. He must have had a natural gift for oratory, aside from his learning and accomplishments and rhetorical arts,--a talent very rare and approaching to creative genius. But to his natural gifts--like Luther, or Henry Clay, born an orator--he added marvellous attainments. He had a most retentive memory. He was versed in the whole history of the world. He was always ready with apt illustrations, which gave interest and finish to his discourses. He was the most industrious and studious man of his age. His attainments were prodigious. He was master of all the knowledge then known, like Gladstone of our day. He was not so learned a man as Varro; but Varro's works have perished, as the great monuments of German scholars are perhaps destined to perish, for lack of style. Cicero's style embalmed his thoughts and made them imperishable. No writer is immortal who is not an artist; Cicero was a consummate artist, and studied the arrangement of sentences, like the historian Tacitus and the Grecian Thucydides.