final vengeance on Antonius. COMPARISON OF DEMOSTHENES AND CICERO. I. The above is all I have been able to find out that is worth being recorded about Demosthenes and Cicero. Without attempting to compare their different styles of oratory, I think it necessary to remark that Demosthenes devoted all his powers, natural and acquired, to the study of eloquence alone, so that he surpassed all his rivals in the law courts and public assembly in perspicuity and ability, all the writers of declamations in splendour and pomp of diction, and all the professional sophists in accuracy and scientific method. Cicero, on the other hand, was a man of great learning and various literary accomplishments. He wrote a considerable number of philosophic treatises modelled on the works of the Academic school, and in all his forensic and political speeches we can detect a desire to let his audience know that he was a man of letters. In their speeches, too, we can discern the impress of their respective characters. The eloquence of Demosthenes never stoops to jest, and is utterly without ornament, but has a terrible concentrated earnestness, which does not smell of the lamp, as Pytheas sneeringly said, but which reminds us of the ungenial, painstaking, acrimonious nature of the man: while Cicero often is carried by his love of jesting to the verge of buffoonery, and in his pleadings treats serious matters in a tone of most unbecoming levity and flippancy, as in the oration for Cæcilius he argues that in an age of such luxury and extravagance there can be nothing to wonder at if a man takes his pleasure; for not to help oneself to the pleasures which are within one's reach is the part of a madman, seeing that the most eminent philosophers have declared the chief felicity of man to consist in pleasure. It is related that when Cato prosecuted Murena, Cicero, who was consul at the time, defended him, and cracked many jokes on Cato as an adherent of the Stoic philosophy, and on the absurdity of the paradoxes which it maintains. The audience, and even the judges, laughed heartily; but Cato merely remarked to those near him, with a quiet smile, "Gentlemen, what a witty consul we have." Cicero, indeed, seems to have been fond of laughter and mirth, and his countenance was calm and smiling; while that of Demosthenes always bore the marks of gloomy, anxious thought, which caused his enemies, as he himself tells us, to call him disagreeable and ill-natured.