the total absence of the philosophical and religious questions which in other places he describes as his greatest delight. Religion, as we understand it, had no place in his heart. If we did not possess the letters, if we judged only by his dialogues and his orations, we should have imagined him deeply interested in all that concerned the national faith; but we see that in his genuine moments he never gave it a thought. Politics, letters, art, his own fame, and the success of his party, such are the points on which he loves to dwell. But he is also most communicative on domestic matters, and shows the tenderest family feeling. To his wife, until the unhappy period of his divorce, to his brother, to his unworthy son, but above all to his daughter, his beloved _Tulliola_, he pours forth, all the warmth of a deep affection; and even his freedman Tiro comes in for a share of kindly banter which shows the friendly footing on which the great man and his dependant stood. Cicero was of all men the most humane. While accepting slavery as an institution of his ancestors, he did all he could to make its burden lighter; he conversed with his slaves, assisted them, mourned their death, and, in a word, treated them as human beings. We learn from the letters that in this matter, and in another of equal importance, the gladiatorial shows, Cicero was far ahead of the feeling of his time. When he listened to his heart, it always led him right. And if it led him above all things to repose complete confidence on his one intimate friend, that only draws us to him the more; he felt like Bacon that a crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk is but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love. It only remains very shortly to mention his poetry. He himself knew that he had not the poetic afflatus, but his immense facility of style which made it as easy for him to write in verse as in prose, and his desire to rival the Greeks in every department of composition, tempted him to essay his wings in various flights of song. We have mentioned his poem on Marius and those on his consulship and times, which pleased himself best and drew forth from others the greatest ridicule. He wrote also versions from the Iliad, of which he quotes several in various works; heroic poems called _Halcyone_ and _Cimon_, an elegy called _Tamelastis_, [82] a _Libellus iocularis_, about which we have no certain information, and various epigrams to Tiro, Caninius, and others. It will he necessary to refer to some of these works on a future page. We shall therefore pass them by here, and conclude the chapter with a short notice of the principal orators who were younger contemporaries of Cicero.