The fourth book of which a mere fragment is preserved, appears to have treated of domestic manners, the education of youth, and of Roman life, public and private. We have lost here many fine pictures of the simplicity of Roman manners, at that flourishing period of the republic, as well as of the progress of luxury, which was not inconsiderable. A fragment of this book is preserved in Nonius, where Scipio opposes the collection of a revenue, necessary perhaps to make good those deficiencies which extravagance had produced. “Nolo enim eundem populum imperatorem et portitorem esse terrarum. Optimum autem et in privatis familiis et in republica vectigal duco esse parsimoniam.” “I am not willing that the same people should be the sovereigns and the toll-gatherers of the world. I look upon economy to be the best revenue for the republic, and for private individuals.” The fifth book is also a mere fragment. St. Augustin has preserved some notices of it, from which it appears that it treated very much of the ancient Roman institutions, with a view to show the degeneracy of the times in which Cicero wrote. In the fifth section of this book, he speaks of the comfortable enjoyment of life depending upon legal marriages and lawful children; from whence perhaps we may gather the obligation which the dissolute manners of the times had laid him under, of asserting the value of these ties, as well as his own veneration for them. Of the sixth book no part whatever has come down to us with this MSS: but the important fragment on a future state preserved in Macrobius, warrants our supposing that he was naturally led in a treatise so highly philosophical, to pass from the consideration of human morals, to the great object which moral conduct has in view: the resisting of human weakness, for the sake of fitting the immortal part of our nature for a higher condition of being. The dream of Scipio, encumbered as it is by some of the pedantry of the schools, is a production of the highest order, upon this most sublime of all subjects. ----- Footnote 1: His. Nat. 18. 3. 1. Footnote 2: Cato de Re Rustica. Majores enim nostri, &c. Footnote 3: Dio. 11. 8. Gellius xv. 27. Footnote 4: Roma patrem patriæ Ciceronem libera dixit. Juv. 8. Footnote 5: Magna Voce me vere jurasse juravit. Ep. fam. 5. 2. Footnote 6: Quoniam, inquit, meos tam suspicione quam crimine judico carere oportere. Suet. J. Cæs. 74. Footnote 7: Sed quoniam qui nihil possunt, &c. Footnote 8: Ep. fam. 8. 14. Footnote 9: “Quid porro aut præclarum putet in rebus humanis.” Lib. 1. xvii. Footnote 10: Let. to Att. vii. 3. Footnote 11: Lact. Inst. vi. 8. CICERO’S REPUBLIC. [Illustration] BOOK I.