He tells us that nothing is worse than half a dozen advocates--which certainly is true.[262] Further on he comes to Caesar, and praises him very highly. But here Brutus is made to speak, and tells us how he has read the Commentaries, and found them to be "bare in their beauty, perfect in symmetry, but unadorned, and deprived of all outside garniture."[263] They are all that he has told us, nor could they have been described in truer words. Then he names Hortensius, and speaks of him in language which is graceful and graphic; but he reserves his greatest strength for himself, and at last, declaring that he will say nothing in his own praise, bursts out into a string of eulogy, which he is able to conceal beneath dubious phrases, so as to show that he himself has acquired such a mastery over his art as to have made himself, in truth, the best orator of them all.[264] Perhaps the chief charm of this essay is to be found in the lightness of the touch. It is never heavy, never severe, rarely melancholic. If read without reference to other works, it would leave on the reader's mind the impression that though now and again there had come upon him the memory of a friend who had gone, and some remembrance of changes in the State to which, as an old man, he could not give his assent; nevertheless, it was written by a happy man, by one who was contented among his books, and was pleased to be reminded that things had gone well with him. He writes throughout as one who had no great sorrow at his heart. No one would have thought that in this very year he was perplexed in his private affairs, even to the putting away of his wife; that Caesar had made good his ground, and, having been Dictator last year, had for the third time become Consul; that he knew himself to be living, as a favor, by Caesar's pleasure. Cicero seems to have written his Brutus as one might write who was well at ease. Let a man have taught himself aught, and have acquired the love of letters, it is easy for him then, we might say, to carry on his work. What is it to him that politicians are cutting each other's throats around him? He has not gone into that arena and fought and bled there, nor need he do so. Though things may have gone contrary to his views, he has no cause for anger, none for personal disappointment, none for personal shame; but with Cicero, on every morning as he rose he must have remembered Pompey and have thought of Caesar. And though Caesar was courteous to him, the courtesy of a ruler is hard to be borne by him who himself has ruled. Caesar was Consul; and Cicero, who remembered how majestically he had walked when a few years since he was Consul by the real votes of the people, how he had been applauded for doing his duty to the people, how he had been punished for stretching the laws on the people's behalf, how he had refused everything for the people, must have had bitter feelings in his heart when he sat down to write this conversation with Brutus and