I recommend to you Middleton’s Life of Cicero: it is written not only in a very fine style, but also in a very fine spirit, whereas Hooke is revoltingly unjust to Cicero, and his diffuse work after all is only patchwork. Until the time of my youth, Cicero was ever revered as a great name, like a god before whom one bows the knee, albeit a θεὸς ἄγνωτος. Throughout the whole of the middle ages also, he stood high in men’s esteem: great minds, like Dante, St. Bernard, Petrarch and others, knew how to enter into his ideas, and could admire him. This feeling rose even to a greater height at the time of the revival of learning. The mania of the _Ciceroniani_ in the sixteenth century is well known: it was held to be quite a heresy to use a phrase which was not to be found in Cicero. Some have been made quite dull by it; others, on the contrary, have thus formed a noble style: of this Manutius is an instance. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a reaction began: people neglected, and even disdained the Latin language and literature, whilst the study of Greek got more in fashion. This was carried still farther during the first ten years of this century, when distinguished philologists would look down upon Cicero with scorn, and sneer at his twaddle, especially in his philosophical writings. Nowadays an enlightened and just estimation of Greek and Latin philology seems to have come into vogue. The philologist’s true standing, according to Quintilian’s saying, is to be judged of by his love of Cicero’s Latin: on the whole, nothing better can be said of him as a writer than this passage of Quintilian. Yet his style is not without its faults: in his earlier writings, particularly in the speeches against Verres, there are passages which are quite unworthy of him, and which he himself also afterwards criticised so severely in his Brutus. In his latest writings, on the other hand, he has not gone down, nor become dry; but there is always a freshness about him. The real spring-time of his life was the time of his prætorship and consulate. After his return, the oration _pro Cælio_ is particularly distinguished; in the later ones, we must take the distress of the times into account. The famous second Philippic, as compared with the rest, has in my opinion been much overrated by the rhetoricians: wherever he gives himself up to vehemence, he exaggerates, which was not natural to him. His mind in fact was thoroughly benevolent, and wherever he shows himself in this light, he is finest. M. Seneca in the Suasoria gives us opinions on Cicero by Livy, Asinius Pollio, and Cassius Severus, which are most remarkable.