uninteresting because they are familiar, he may pause or digress before the mind is weary and the attention begins to flag; the reader is carried on by easy journeys and short stages, and novelty in the speaker supplies the want of novelty in the matter. Nor does Cicero discover less skill in the execution of these dialogues than address in their method. It were idle to enlarge upon the beauty, richness, and taste of compositions which have been the admiration of every age and country. In the dignity of his speakers, their high tone of mutual courtesy, the harmony of his groups, and the delicate relief of his contrasts, he is inimitable. The majesty and splendour of his introductions, which generally address themselves to the passions or the imagination, the eloquence with which both sides of a question are successively displayed, the clearness and terseness of his statements on abstract points, the grace of his illustrations, his exquisite allusions to the scene or time of the supposed conversation, his digressions in praise of philosophy or great men, his quotations from Grecian and Roman poetry; lastly, the melody and fulness of his style, unite to throw a charm round his writings peculiar to themselves. To the Roman reader they especially recommended themselves by their continual and most artful references to the heroes of the old republic, who now appeared but exemplars, and (as it were) patrons of that eternal philosophy, which he had before, perhaps, considered as the short-lived reveries of ingenious but inactive men. Nor is there any confusion, want of keeping, or appearance of effort in the introduction of the various beauties we have been enumerating, which are blended together with so much skill and propriety, that it is sometimes difficult to point out the particular sources of the admiration which they inspire. 9. The series of his rhetorical works[201] has been preserved nearly complete, and consists of the _De Inventione_, _De Oratore_, _Brutus sive de claris Oratoribus_, _Orator sive de optimo genere Dicendi_, _De partitione Oratoria_, _Topica_, and _de optimo genere Oratorum_. The last-mentioned, which is a fragment, is understood to have been the proem to his translation (now lost) of the speeches of Demosthenes and AEschines, _De Corona_. These he translated with the view of defending, by the example of the Greek orators, his own style of eloquence, which, as we shall afterwards find, the critics of the day censured as too Asiatic in its character; and hence the proem, which still survives, is on the subject of the Attic style of oratory. This composition and his abstracts of his own orations[202] are his only rhetorical works not extant, and probably our loss is not very great. The _Treatise on Rhetoric_, addressed to Herennius, though edited with his works, and ascribed to him by several of the ancients, is now generally attributed to Cornificius, or some other writer of the day.