I can hardly content myself with classifying the De Republica and the De Legibus under the same name with these essays of Cicero, which are undoubtedly moral in their nature. But it may pass, perhaps, without that distinct contradiction which had to be made as to the enveloping the De Officiis in the garb of philosophy. It has been the combining of the true and false in one set, and handing them down to the world as Cicero's philosophy, which has done the mischief. The works reviewed in the last chapter contained disputations on the Greek philosophy which Cicero thought might be well handled in the Latin language for the benefit of his countrymen. It would be well for them to know what Epicurus taught, or Zeno, and how they differed from Socrates and Plato, and this he told them. Now in these moral essays he gives them his own philosophy--if that may be called philosophy which is intended to teach men how to live well. There are six books on government, called the De Republica, and three on law; and there are the three treatises on old age and friendship, each in one book, and that on the duty of man to man, in three. There is a common error in the world as to the meaning of the word republic. It has come to have a sweet savor in the nostrils of men, or a most evil scent, according to their politics. But there is, in truth, the Republic of Russia, as there is that of the United States, and that of England. Cicero, in using it as the name of his work, simply means "the government;" and the treatise under that head contains an account of the Roman Empire, and is historical rather than argumentative and scientific. He himself was an oligarch, and had been brought up amid a condition of things in which that most deleterious form of government recommended itself to him as containing all that had been good and magnificent in the Roman Empire. The great men of Rome, whom the empire had demanded for its construction, had come up each for the work of a year; and, when succeeding, had perhaps been elected for a second. By the expulsion of their kings, the class from whom these men had been chosen showed their personal desire for honor, and the marvel is that through so many centuries those oligarchs should have flourished. The reader, unless he be strongly impregnated with democratic feelings, when he begins to read Roman history finds himself wedded to the cause of these oligarchs. They have done the big deeds, and the opposition comes to them from vulgar hands. Let me ask any man who remembers the reading of his Livy whether it was not so with him. But it was in truth the democratic element opposed to these leaders, and the battles they won from time to time within the walls of the city, which produced the safety of Rome and enabled the government to go on. Then by degrees the people became enervated and the leaders became corrupt, and by masterhood over foreign people and external subjects slaves were