The De Oratore is by far the longest of his works on rhetoric, and, as I think, the pleasantest to read. It was followed, after ten years, by the Brutus, or De Claris Oratoribus, and then by the Orator. But in all of them he charms us rather by his example than instructs us by his precepts. He will never make us believe, for instance, that a man who talks well will on that account be better than a man who thinks well; but he does make us believe that a man who talks as Cicero knew how to do must have been well worth hearing, and also that to read his words, when listening to them is no longer possible, is a great delight. Having done that, he has no doubt carried his object. He was too much a man of the world to have an impracticable theory on which to expend himself. Oratory had come uppermost with him, and had indeed made itself, with the Romans, the only pursuit to be held in rivalry with that of fighting. Literature had not as yet assumed its place. It needed Cicero himself to do that for her. It required the writing of such an essay as this to show, by the fact of its existence, that Cicero the writer stood quite as high as Cicero the orator. And then the written words remain when the sounds have died away. We believe that Cicero spoke divinely. We can form for ourselves some idea of the rhythm of his periods. Of the words in which Cicero spoke of himself as a speaker we have the entire charm. Boccaccio, when he takes his queen into a grassy meadow and seats her in the midst of her ladies, and makes her and them and their admirers tell their stories, seems to have given rise to the ideas which Cicero has used when introducing his Roman orators lying under a plane-tree in the garden of Tusculum, and there discussing rhetoric; so much nearer to us appear the times of Cicero, with all the light that has been thrown upon them by their own importance, than does the middle of the fourteenth century in the same country. But the practice in this as in all matters of social life was borrowed from the Greeks, or perhaps rather the pretence of the practice. We can hardly believe that Romans of an advanced age would so have arranged themselves for the sake of conversation. It was a manner of bringing men together which had its attraction for the mind's eye; and Cicero, whose keen imagination represented to him the pleasantness of the picture, has used the form of narrative with great effect. He causes Crassus and Antony to meet in the garden of Crassus at Tusculum, and thither he brings, on the first day, old Mucius Scaevola the augur, and Sulpicius and Cotta, two rising orators of the period. On the second day Scaevola is supposed to be too fatigued to renew the intellectual contest, and he retires; but one Caesar comes in with Quintus Lutatius Catulus, and the conversation is renewed. Crassus and Antony carry it on in chief, but Crassus has the leading voice. Caesar, who must have been the wag among barristers of his