Of these, the most important was the Treatise _De Republicâ_, which, in the general wreck of learning, shared the fate of the institutions it was intended to celebrate. The greater part of this dialogue having disappeared along with the _Origines_ of Cato, the works of Varro, and the History of Sallust, we have been deprived of all the writings which would have thrown the most light on the Roman institutions, manners, and government—of everything, in short, which philosophically traced the progress of Rome, from its original barbarism to the perfection which it had attained in the age of the second Scipio Africanus. There are few monuments of ancient literature, of which the disappearance had excited more regret, than that of the work _De Republicâ_, which was long believed to have been the grand repository of all the political wisdom of the ancients. The great importance of the subject—treated, too, by a writer at once distinguished by his genius and former official dignity; the pride and predilection with which the author himself speaks of it, and the sublimity and beauty of the fragment entitled _Somnium Scipionis_, preserved from it by Macrobius, all concurred to exalt this treatise in the imagination of the learned, and to exasperate their vexation at its loss. The fathers of the church, particularly Lactantius, had afforded some insight into the arguments employed in it on different topics; several fragments existed in the works of the grammarians, and a complete copy was extant as late as the 11th century. Since that time the literary world have been flattered at different periods with hopes of its discovery; but it is only within the last few years that such a portion of it has been recovered, as may suffice, in a considerable degree, to satisfy curiosity, though not perhaps to fulfil expectation.