The years which followed Cicero's return from the East were occupied, with the single break of his quaestorship in Sicily, by hard and continuous work at the bar. His speeches of this date, being non- political, have for the most part not been preserved. The two still imperfectly extant, the _Pro Roscio Comoedo_ of 76, and the _Pro Tullio_ of 72 B.C., form, together with two other speeches dating from before his visit to the East, the _Pro Quinctio_ and _Pro Roscio Amerino_, and, with his juvenile treatise on rhetoric known as the _De Inventione_, the body of prose composition which represents the first of his four periods. These early speeches are carefully composed according to the scholastic canons then in vogue, the hard legal style of the older courts alternating with passages of carefully executed artificial ornament. Their chief interest is one of contrast with his matured style; for they show, no doubt with much accuracy, what the general level of oratory was out of which the great Ciceronian eloquence sprang. In 70 B.C., at the age of thirty-six, Cicero at last found his great chance, and seized it. The impeachment of Verres for maladministration in the government of Sicily was a political trial of great constitutional importance. It was undertaken at the direct encouragement of Pompeius, who had entered on his first or democratic consulate, and was indirectly a formidable attack both on the oligarchic administration of the provinces and on the senatorian jury-panels, in whose hands the Sullan constitution had placed the only check upon misgovernment. The defence of Verres was undertaken by Hortensius; the selection of Cicero as chief counsel for the prosecution by the democratic leaders was a public recognition of him as the foremost orator on the Pompeian side. He threw himself into the trial with all his energy. After his opening speech, and the evidence which followed, Verres threw up his defence and went into exile. This, of course, brought the case to an end; but the cause turned on larger issues than his particular guilt or innocence. The whole of the material prepared against him was swiftly elaborated by Cicero into five great orations, and published as a political document. These orations, the _Second Action against Verres_ as they are called, were at once the most powerful attack yet made on the working of the Sullan constitution, and the high-water mark of the earlier period of Cicero's eloquence. It was not till some years later that his oratory culminated; but he never excelled these speeches in richness and copiousness of style, in ease and lucidity of exposition, and in power of dealing with large masses of material. He at once became an imposing political force; perhaps it was hardly realised till later how incapable that force was of going straight or of bearing down opposition. The series of political and semi-political speeches of the next ten years, down to his exile, represent for the time