an accomplished orator. He was born and educated at a period when he must have formed the most exalted idea of his country. She had reached the height of power, and had not yet sunk into submission or servility. The subjects to be discussed, and characters to be canvassed, were thus of the most imposing magnitude, and could still be treated with freedom and independence. The education, too, which Cicero had received, was highly favourable to his improvement. He had the first philosophers of the age for his teachers, and he studied the civil law under Scævola, the most learned jurisconsult who had hitherto appeared in Rome. When he came to attend the Forum, he enjoyed the advantage of daily hearing Hortensius, unquestionably the most eloquent speaker who had yet shone in the Forum or Senate. The harangues of this great pleader formed his taste, and raised his emulation, and, till near the conclusion of his oratorical career, acted as an incentive to exertions, which might have abated, had he been left without a competitor in the Forum. The blaze of Hortensius’s rhetoric would communicate to his rival a brighter flame of eloquence than if he had been called on to refute a cold and inanimate adversary. Still, however, the great secret of his distinguished oratorical eminence was, that notwithstanding his vanity, he never fell into the apathy with regard to farther improvement, by which self-complacency is so often attended. On the contrary, Cicero, after he had delivered two celebrated orations, which filled the Forum with his renown, so far from resting satisfied with the acclamations of the capital, abandoned, for a time, the brilliant career on which he had entered, and travelled, during two years, through the cities of Greece, in quest of philosophical improvement and rhetorical instruction. With powers of speaking beyond what had yet been known in his own country, and perhaps not inferior to those which had ever adorned any other, he possessed, in a degree superior to all orators, of whatever age or nation, a general and discursive acquaintance with philosophy and literature, together with an admirable facility of communicating the fruits of his labours, in a manner the most copious, perspicuous, and attractive. To this extensive knowledge, by which his mind was enriched and supplied with endless topics of illustration—to the lofty ideas of eloquence, which perpetually revolved in his thoughts—to that image which ever haunted his breast, of such infinite and superhuman perfection in oratory, that even the periods of Demosthenes did not fill up the measure of his conceptions(313), we are chiefly indebted for those emanations of genius, which have given, as it were, an immortal tongue to the now desolate Forum and ruined Senate of Rome.