The part that Cicero had in the Roman Revolution, in that long procession of events which terminated in the establishment of the Empire, if not a lofty one, was nevertheless such as to render his history painfully interesting. We see a man who was far above his his contemporaries in moral excellence, and who sought to live well, tried by circumstances beyond human strength. Cicero lived a century too early, or a century too late. He would have been at his ease as the contemporary and friend of Paulus Æmilius, but it was not in his nature to be on fair terms with such men as Cæsar and Pompeius, much less with Antonius. Had he lived a century later, he might have been a calm philosopher and scholar under the Imperial system. He was, of all men that ever lived, of equal eminence for ability, the least adapted for a revolutionary age; and yet it was his fortune to live in the time of the greatest of all revolutions, and in its very focus, and to be a prominent actor therein. It was as if Fortune had had a spite against his house, and had concentrated all her vengeance on his head, by way of rendering vain the most various and splendid talents that ever were bestowed upon mortal man. Had Cicero's sense borne any proportion to his intellectual powers, had he been endowed with a just portion of that tact which is a more useful thing than genius in a world where they win sixpences, he would have retired from public life on his return from exile. But something very like vanity forbade that. He had been too great to be able to imitate the sensible course of his friend, "the voluptuous, but august Lucullus." He would keep the field which he had won, and in which his part had been so brilliant; and the result was, that he never knew a happy hour. But his miseries made him immortal. Who would have cared for him, had he passed the last dozen years of his life at his Formian villa? The remark of Montesquieu, that that people are happy whose annals are tiresome, is strictly true; but we do not care to read those annals, while those periods in which men were unhappy concentrate the attention of both writers and readers. In Rome's revolutionary age men were as happy as they are in times of pestilence; and Cicero was the greatest sufferer of them all, because he was possessed of a sensitiveness that no other Roman ever knew. It is his history, quite as much as that of either Pompeius or Cæsar, that gives a biographical character to the history of the Republic's closing days, and renders its study so fascinating, and this without reference to his private life, some passages of which have a rather ludicrous air,--his marrying a young wife, for example, after divorcing an old one.