These names are only selected because they afford well-known and easily
verifiable instances, requiring neither pictorial nor biographical
illustration. Energy may be equally conspicuous in any other department
of life, and display itself as fully in the civilian as in the warrior.
Two of the individuals adduced are striking instances of this:—Cato the
Censor, and the Earl of Chatham. They were men of remarkable parallelism
of character, and, though differing in other facial features, their
Noses were very similar.
[Illustration:
CATO THE CENSOR.
(_From a gem in the Florentine Museum._)
]
The events of their early life—those events which always bear most
clearly the impress of the mind, because actuated by choice, and not by
present or future consequences—were almost identical. They both entered
the army in youth, and both quitted it for the Senate. Here each
displayed those powers of eloquence which raised them to the highest
eminence, and will transmit their names to the latest posterity. Its
peculiar feature was that energetic, powerful, and determined vehemence
of language, which takes the mind prisoner, and carries the judgment
with it by storm. It was irresistible. Before it all minds of less
power, though of greater intellect and activity, recoiled. The orations
of Cato are unhappily lost. But Cicero, a master of eloquence, and well
enabled to compare them with similar compositions, passes upon them the
highest eulogiums. The eloquence of Cato has been compared, for its
force and energy, to the eloquence of that Demosthenes before whom
Philip of Macedon quailed, and whose tremendous orations have given the
name of Philippics to all sarcastic and vehement invectives. Of
Chatham’s eloquence, it has been said by Wilkes: “Nothing could
withstand the force of that contagion. The fluent Murray has faltered,
and even Fox shrunk back appalled from an adversary ‘fraught with fire
unquenchable,’ if I may borrow the expression of our great Milton. He
had not the correctness of language so striking in the great Roman
orator; but he had the _verba ardentia_, the bold, glowing words.”
Cato led victorious armies into the field, and proved himself an able
general; for in Rome the functions of the general and the statesman were
united in the person of the Consul.
It became not, however, the Secretary of State to lead armies in person;
but while Chatham administered the affairs of this country, “victory
crowned the British arms wherever they appeared, both on sea and land;
and the four years of the second administration of Mr. Pitt are four of
the most glorious years in the history of the eighteenth century.”[10]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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