Mr. Forsyth aims to give his readers some account of Cicero's private and domestic life, and in this respect his book has a positive superiority to Middleton's. It is agreeable to read of the _vie privée_ of great men, and it is especially so in the case of such a man as Cicero, who belonged to a people long since extinct, and who was himself "the bright, consummate flower" of a civilization which exists only in books, or in monuments, or in ruins,--a civilization of which it has wisely been said, that it is the better for the world that it can never know it again, "for it was rotten at the core, though most glorious in the complexion." But, when all has been said of Cicero's private life that can be said of it, we find ourselves going back to Cicero the statesman, the orator, and the actor in some of the mightiest movements that ever have shaken the world, and which continue to color our own private lives at the end of almost two thousand years. If you would write a book on Roman life and society, as such things were in the last century of the Republic, Catulus, or any other member of the class of _optimates_, would serve your purpose as well as Cicero. Men of the same station live very much alike as to essentials. But no Roman can be named who matches Cicero in some most important respects as a public man,--as consul, as proconsul, as orator, as philosopher, as statesman, and as mere politician. His history, therefore, is the history of Rome through many eventful years; and when he is murdered, we feel that the curtain really has dropped because the great Republican drama is at an end. That sad scene is the last scene of the fifth act of a tragedy that had been in course of performance through five centuries. We cannot separate such a man from his times. His private life is as nothing in comparison with his public life. Private life belongs to comedy, and Cicero's history is a tragedy, from first to last; and in reading any biography of him that is prepared, we feel that we are reading Roman history,--and that is written only in blood.