[218] It may be worth while to give a translation of the anecdote as told by Aulus Gellius, and to point out that the authors intention was to show what a clever fellow Cicero was. Cicero did defend P. Sulla this year; but whence came the story of the money borrowed from Sulla we do not know. "It is a trick of rhetoric craftily to confess charges made, so as not to come within the reach of the law. So that, if anything base be alleged which cannot be denied, you may turn it aside with a joke, and make it a matter of laughter rather than of disgrace, as it is written that Cicero did when, with a drolling word, he made little of a charge which he could not deny. For when he was anxious to buy a house on the Palatine Hill, and had not the ready money, he quietly borrowed from P. Sulla--who was then about to stand his trial, 'sestertium viciens'--twenty million sesterces. When that became known, before the purchase was made, and it was objected to him that he had borrowed the money from a client, then Cicero, instigated by the unexpected charge, denied the loan, and denied also that he was going to buy the house. But when he had bought it and the fib was thrown in his teeth, he laughed heartily, and asked whether men had so lost their senses as not to be aware that a prudent father of a family would deny an intended purchase rather than raise the price of the article against himself."--Noctes Atticæ, xii., 12. Aulus Gellius though he tells us that the story was written, does not tell us where he read it. [219] I must say this, "pace" Mr. Tyrrell, who, in his note on the letter to Atticus, lib. i., 12, attempts to show that some bargain for such professional fee had been made. Regarding Mr. Tyrrell as a critic always fair, and almost always satisfactory, I am sorry to have to differ from him; but it seems to me that he, too, has been carried away by the feeling that in defending a man's character it is best to give up some point. [220] I have been amused at finding a discourse, eloquent and most enthusiastic, in praise of Cicero and especially of this oration, spoken by M. Guéroult at the College of France in June, 1815. The worst literary faults laid to the charge of Cicero, if committed by him--which M. Guéroult thinks to be doubtful--had been committed even by Voltaire and Racine! The learned Frenchman, with whom I altogether sympathize, rises to an ecstasy of violent admiration, and this at the very moment in which Waterloo was being fought. But in truth the great doings of the world do not much affect individual life. We should play our whist at the clubs though the battle of Dorking were being fought.