The work on the Nature of the Gods, though in many respects a most valuable production, and a convincing proof of the extensive learning of its author, gives a melancholy picture of the state of his mind. Unfitted to bear adversity, and borne down by the calamities of his country, and the death of his beloved daughter, (misfortunes of which he often complains,) Cicero seems to have become a sceptic, and occasionally to have doubted even of a superintending Providence. Warburton appears to be right in supposing, that Cicero was advanced in years before he seriously adopted the sceptical opinions of the new Academy. “This farther appears,” says he, after some remarks on this head, “from a place in his Nature of the Gods, where he says, that his espousing the new Academy of a sudden, was a thing altogether unlooked for(440). The change, then, was late, and after the ruin of the republic, when Cicero retired from business, and had leisure in his recess to plan and execute this noble undertaking. So that a learned critic appears to have been mistaken, when he supposed the choice of the new Academy was made in his youth. ‘This sect,’ says he, ‘did best agree with the vast genius, and ambitious spirit, of _young Cicero_(441).’ ” It appears not, however, to have been, as Warburton supposes, altogether from a systematic plan, of explaining to his countrymen the philosophy of the Greeks, that Cicero became a sceptic; but partly from gloomy views of nature and providence. It seems difficult otherwise to account for the circumstance, that Cotta, an ancient and venerable Consul, the _Pontifex_ of the metropolis of the world, should be introduced as contending, even against an Epicurean, for the non-existence of the gods. Lord Bolingbroke has justly remarked, “that Cotta disputes so vehemently, and his arguments extend so far, that Tully makes his own brother accuse him directly, and himself by consequence indirectly, of atheism.—‘Studio contra Stoicos disserendi deos mihi videtur funditus tollere.’ Now, what says Tully in his own name? He tells his brother that Cotta disputes in that manner, rather to confute the Stoics than to destroy the religion of mankind.—‘Magis quam ut hominum deleat religionem.’ But Quintus answers, that is, Tully makes him answer, he was not the bubble of an artifice, employed to save the appearance of departing from the public religious institutions. ‘Ne communi jure migrare videatur(442).’ ” Cotta, indeed, goes so far in his attack on Providence, that Lord Bolingbroke, who is not himself a model of orthodoxy, takes up the other side of the question against the Roman Pontiff, and pleads the cause of Providence with no little reason and eloquence.(443)