CICERO, Marcus Tullius, the celebrated Roman orator, was born in the year of Rome 647, or about 105 years before Christ. His father Marcus Tullius, who was of the equestrian order, took great care of his education, which was directed particularly with a view to the bar. On his first appearance in public, young Tully declaimed with such vehemence against Sylla’s party, that it became expedient for him to retire into Greece, where he attended the Athenian orators and philosophers, and greatly improved both in eloquence and knowledge. Here he met with his school-fellow Titus Pomponius, who, from his love of Athens, and having spent a great part of his days in that city, obtained the surname of Atticus ; and here they revived and confirmed that noted friendship which subsisted between them through life with unshaken constancy and affection. From Athens Tully passed into Asia, and after an excursion of two years returned to Italy much improved by his travels.

Cicero had now established himself at Rome, where, after one year more spent at the bar, he obtained the dignity of questor. Among the causes which hè pleaded before his questorship, was that of the famous comedian Roscius, whom singular excellence in his art had recommended to the familiarity and friendship of the greatest men in Rome. The questors were the general receivers or treasurers of the republic,-and were sent annually into the provinces assigned them by lot. The island of Sicily happened to fall to Cicero’s share, including that part of it,—for it was considerable enough to be divided into two provinces,— which was called Lilybaeum. The office of questor he received, not as a gift, but as a trust; and he acquitted himself[7:6:691] so well in discharge of it, that he gained the love and admiration of all the Sicilians. Before he left Sicily, he made the tour of the island, in order to visit every thing curious, especially the city of Syracuse, at which place he pointed out the tomb of Archimedes to the magistrates, who were showing him the curiosities of the place; but, to his surprise, he found that they knew nothing either of the tomb or of him whose ashes it contained.

We have no account of the precise time of Cicero’s marriage with Terentia; but it is supposed to have been celebrated immediately after his return from his travels to Italy, when he was about thirty. Being now disengaged from his questorship in Sicily, by which first step in the legal gradation and ascent of public honours he had gained an immediate right to the senate, and an actual admission into it during life, he again settled in Rome, where he employed himself constantly in defending the persons and properties of its citizens, and indeed became a general patron of causes. Five years had scarcely elapsed since Cicero’s election to the questorship (this being the proper interval prescribed by law before he could hold the next office), when he was, in his thirty-seventh year, elected aedile by the unanimous suffrages of the tribes, and in preference to all his competitors. After Cicero’s election to the aedileship, but before his entrance upon office, he undertook the famous prosecution of Verres, the late praetor of Sicily, who was charged with many flagrant acts of injustice, rapine, and cruelty, during his triennial government of that island. This was one of the most memorable transactions of his life, one for which he was greatly and justly celebrated by antiquity, and for which he will, in all ages, be admired and esteemed by the friends of mankind. The result was, that, by his diligence and address, he so confounded Hortensius, though the reigning orator at the bar, and usually styled the king of the forum, that his majesty had nothing to say for his client. Verres, despairing of all defence, submitted immediately, without waiting the sentence, to a voluntary exile, in which condition he lived many years, forgotten and deserted by all his friends. He is said to have been relieved in this miserable situation by the generosity of Cicero; but at length he was proscribed and murdered by Mark Antony, for the sake of those fine statues and Corinthian vessels of which he had plundered the Sicilians.

After the usual interval of two years from the time of his being chosen aedile, Cicero offered himself as a candidate for the praetorship; and, in three different assemblies convened for the choice of praetors, two of which were dissolved without effect, he was every time declared the first praetor by the suffrages of the centuries. He was now in the full career of his fortunes, and in sight, as it were, of the consulship, the grand object of his ambition; and therefore, when his praetorship terminated, he refused to accept any foreign province, the usual reward of that magistracy, and the chief fruit which the generality proposed from it. He had no particular love for money, and no genius for war; so that those governments had no charms for him. The glory which he pursued was to shine in the eyes of the city as the guardian of its laws; to teach the magistrates how to execute, and the citizens how to obey them.

Being now in his forty-third year, the proper age required by law, he declared himself a candidate for the consulship, along with six competitors, L. Sulpicius Galba, L. Sergius Catilina, C. Antonius, L. Cassius Longinus, Q. Cornificius, and C. Licinius Sacerdos. The first two were patricians; the next two plebeians, yet noble; the last two the sons of fathers who had first imported the public honours into their families; Cicero was the only new man, as he was called, among them, or person of the equestrian rank. These were the competitors; and in the competition the practice of bribing was carried on openly and shamefully by Antony and Catiline. However, as the election approached, Cicero’s interest appeared to be superior to that of all the candidates; for the nobles themselves, though always envious of and desirous to depress him, yet, considering the dangers which threatened the city from many quarters and seemed ready to burst out into a flame, they began to think him the only man qualified to preserve the republic, and to quash the cabals of the desperate, by the vigour and prudence of his administration. The method of choosing consuls was not by an open vote, but by a kind of ballot, or little tickets of wood distributed to the citizens, with the names of the several candidates inscribed upon each. But in Cicero’s case the people were not content with this secret and silent way. Before they came to any scrutiny, they loudly and universally proclaimed Cicero the first consul; so that, as he himself says, “he was not chosen by the votes of particular citizens, but by the common suffrage of the city; not declared by the voice of the crier, but by that of the whole Roman people.”

Cicero had no sooner entered upon his office than he had occasion to exert himself against P. Servilius Rullus, one of the new tribunes, who had been alarming the senate with the promulgation of an agrarian law; the purpose of which was to create a decemvirate, or ten commissioners, with absolute power for five years over all the revenues of the republic, to distribute them at pleasure to the citizens, and to exercise other functions equally incompatible with the existence of society. These laws used to be greedily received by the populace, and were therefore proposed by factious magistrates as often as they had any point to carry with the multitude against the public good; so that Cicero’s first business was to quiet the apprehensions of the city, and to baffle, if possible, the intrigues of the tribune. Accordingly, in an artful and elegant speech from the rostra, he gave such a turn to the inclination of the people, that they rejected this law with as much eagerness as they had ever received one. But the affair which constituted the great glory of his consulship, and which has transmitted his name with such lustre to posterity, was the skill he showed, and the unwearied pains he took, in suppressing the conspiracy which had been formed by Catiline and his accomplices for the subversion of the commonwealth. For this great service he was honoured with the glorious title of Pater Patrice, or Father of his Country, a title which he retained for a long time afterwards.

Cicero’s administration was now at an end; but he had no sooner quitted his office than he began to feel the effects of that envy which is the certain fruit of illustrious merit. He was now, therefore, the common mark, not only of all the factious, against whom he had declared perpetual war, but of another party not less dangerous, the envious, whose united malice never left him from this moment till they had driven him out of the very city which he had so lately preserved. Cicero, upon the expiration of his consulship, took care to send a particular account of his whole administration to Pompey, then occupied with the Mithridatic war in Asia; in hopes no doubt of preventing any wrong impressions there from the calumnies of his enemies, and of drawing from that commander some public declaration in favour of what had been done. But Pompey being informed by Metellus and Caesar of the ill humour which was rising up against Cicero in Rome, answered him with great coldness, and instead of paying him any compliment, took no notice at all of what had passed in the affair of Catiline; an omission in regard to which Cicero expostulates with him in a letter which is still extant.

About this time Cicero bought a house of Marcus Crassus, [7:6:692]on the Palatine Hill, adjoining to that in which he had always lived with his father, and which he is supposed to have given up to his brother Quintius. The house cost him a very large sum, and seems to have been one of the noblest in Rome. The purchase of so expensive a house led to some censure of his vanity, especially as it was effected with borrowed money; a circumstance which he himself does not dissemble, but observes jocosely, with reference to it, that “he was now plunged so deeply in debt, as to be ready for a plot, only that the conspirators would not trust him.”

The most remarkable event that happened in this year, which was the forty-fifth of Cicero’s life, was the pollution of the mysteries of the Bona Dea by Publius Clodius, a crime which, by an unhappy train of consequences, involved Ciccro in a great, and unexpected calamity. Clodius had an intrigue with Caesar’s wife Pompeia, who, according to annual custom, was now celebrating in her house those awful sacrifices of the goddess, to which no male creature was ever admitted, and where everything masculine was so scrupulously excluded, that even pictures of that sort were covered during the ceremony. It flattered Clodius’s imagination greatly to gain access to his mistress in the midst of her holy ministry; and with this view he dressed himself in a woman’s habit, that by the benefit of his smooth face, and the introduction of one of the female servants, he might pass without discovery; but by some mistake between him and his guide, he lost his way when he came within the house, and fell unluckily among the other female servants. Here he was detected by his voice, and the servants alarmed the whole company by their shrieks, to the great amazement of the matrons, who threw a veil over their sacred mysteries, while Clodius found means to escape. The story was presently spread abroad, and raised a general scandal and horror throughout the city. The whole defence which Clodius made when, by order of the senate, he was brought to trial, was to prove himself absent at the time when the offence was committed; for which purpose he produced two men to swear that he was then at Interamna, distant about two or three days’ journey from the city. But Cicero being called upon to give his testimony, deposed that Clodius had been with him that very morning at his house in Rome. Irritated by this, Clodius formed a scheme of revenge. This was to get himself chosen tribune, and in that office to drive Cicero out of the city, by the publication of a law, which, by some stratagem or other, he hoped to obtrude upon the people. But as all patricians were incapable of the tribunate by its original institution, so his first step was to make himself a plebeian, by the pretence of an adoption into a plebeian house, which could not yet be done without the suffrage of the people. The first triumvirate had now been formed, being in reality nothing else but a traitorous conspiracy of three of the most powerful citizens of Rome, to extort from their country by violence what they could not obtain by law. Pompey’s chief motive was to get his acts confirmed by Caesar in his consulship, which was now approaching; Caesar, by giving way to Pompey’s glory, thought to advance his own; while Crassus hoped to gain that ascendency by the authority of Pompey and Caesar which he could not sustain alone. Cicero might have made what terms he pleased with the triumvirate, and even been admitted a partner of their power, or a fourth in their league; but he would not enter into any engagements with the three, whose union he and all friends of the republic abhorred. Clodius, in the mean time, had been pushing on the business of his adoption, which at last he effected, and began soon afterwards to threaten Cicero with all the terrors of his tribunate, to which he was now advanced without any opposition. Both Caesar and Pompey secretly favoured his scheme; not that they intended to ruin Cicero, but only to keep him under the lash; and if they could not draw him into their measures, or induce him at least to remain quiet, to let Clodius loose upon him. Caesar, in particular, wanted to distress him so far as to force him to a dependence on himself; and hence, while he was privately encouraging Clodius to pursue him, he was proposing expedients to Cicero for his security. But though his fortunes seemed now to be in a tottering condition, and his enemies daily gained ground upon him, yet he was unwilling to owe an obligation for his safety to any man, far less to Caesar, whose designs he had always suspected, and whose schemes he never approved. This stiffness in Ciccro so exasperated Caesar, that he resolved immediately to assist Clodius with his whole power to oppress him; while Pompey was all the while giving him the strongest assurances that there was no danger, and that he would sooner be killed himself than suffer him to be hurt.

Clodius, in the mean time, was obliging the people with several new laws, contrived chiefly for their advantage; in the hope, no doubt, that he might thereby introduce with a better grace the ground-plot of the plan for the banishment of Cicero. In short, having caused a law to be enacted, importing, that whoever had condemned a Roman citizen unheard should be banished, he soon afterwards impeached Ciccro upon the enactment. It was in vain that the great orator went up and down the city soliciting his cause in the habit of a suppliant, and attended by many of the first young noblemen whom he had taught the rules of eloquence; those powers of speaking which had so often been successful in defending the cause of others, seemed totally to forsake him in pleading his own. He was banished by the votes of the people four hundred miles from Italy; his houses were ordered to be demolished, and his goods set up to sale. It cannot be denied that, in this great calamity, he did not behave himself with that firmness which might have reasonably been expected in one who had borne so glorious a part in the republic, conscious of his integrity, and suffering in the cause of his country; and his letters are for the most part filled with such lamentable expressions of grief and despair, that his friends, and even his wife, were forced sometimes to admonish him to rouse his courage, and to remember his former character. Atticus was constantly putting him in mind of this, and sent him notice of a report which had been brought to Rome by one of Cassius’s freed-men, that his affliction had disordered his senses. He was now indeed attacked in his weakest part, the only place in which he was vulnerable. To have been as great in affliction as he was in prosperity, would have been to exhibit a perfection not given to man; yet his very weakness flowed from a source which rendered him the more amiable in all the other relations of his life; and the same tenderness of disposition which made him love his friends, bis children, and his country, more passionately than other men, caused him to feel the loss of them more sensibly. When he had been gone a little more than two months, a motion was made in the senate by one of the tribunes, who was his friend, to recal him, and repeal the laws of Clodius, to which the whole house readily agreed. Many obstructions, as may be easily imagined, were given to it by the Clodian faction; but this made the senate only more resolute to effect the object proposed. They passed a vote, therefore, that no other business should be done till Cicero’s return had been carried; which it at last was, and in so splendid and triumphant a manner, that he had reason, he says, to fear lest people should imagine that he himself had contrived his'late flight for the sake of so glorious a restoration.

Cicero, now in his fiftieth year^Avas restored to his former dignity, and soon afterwards to his former fortunes; [7:6:693]satisfaction being made to him for the ruin of his estates and houses, which last were rebuilt by himself with more magnificence than before. But about this time he had domestic grievances which touched him very nearly, and which, as he signifies obscurely to Atticus, were of too delicate a nature to be expressed in a letter: They arose chiefly from the petulant humour of his wife, which began to give him frequent occasions of chagrin; and, by a series of repeated provocations, confirmed in him the settled disgust which at last ended in a divorce.

In the fifty-sixth year of his age he was appointed proconsul of Cilicia, and his administration there gained him great honour. About this time the expectation of a breach between Caesar and Pompey engaged the general attention. Crassus had been destroyed with his army some years before, in the war with the Parthians; and Julia, the daughter of Caesar, whom Pompey had married, and who, while she lived, formed the cement of their union, had also died in childbed. Caesar had put an end to the Gallic war, and reduced the whole province under the Roman yoke; but though his commission was near expiring, he seemed to have no thoughts of giving up his command and returning to the condition of a private subject. He pretended that he could not possibly be safe-if he parted with his army, especially while Pompey held the province of Spain, the government of which had been continued to him for five years. This tendency towards a breach Cicero learned from his friends, as he was returning from his province of Cilicia. But as he foresaw the consequences of a war more clearly and fully than any of them, so his first resolution was to apply all his endeavours and authority to the mediation of a peace; though, in the event of a breach, he secretly determined to follow the fortunes of Pompey. He clearly foresaw, and indeed declared without scruple to his friends, that which side soever proved victorious, the war must necessarily end in a tyranny. The only difference, he said, was, that if their enemies conquered, they should be proscribed; if their friends, they would be slaves.

He had no sooner arrived in the city, however, than he fell, as he tells us, into the very flame of civil discord, and found the war in effect proclaimed; for the senate had just voted a decree that Caesar should disband his army by a certain day, or be declared a public enemy; and his sudden march towards Rome had effectually confirmed it. In the midst of all this hurry and confusion, Caesar was extremely solicitous about Cicero; not so much to gain him, for that was not to be expected, as to prevail with him to remain neutral. He wrote to him several times to this effect, and employed all their common friends to press him with letters on the subject, but in vain; for Cicero was impatient to join Pompey. In the mean time these letters give us a most sensible proof of the high esteem and credit in which Cicero was held at this time in Rome; when, in a contest for empire, which force alone was to decide, the chiefs on both sides were so solicitous to gain a man to their party who had no peculiar skill in arms nor talents for war. Pursuing, however, the result of all his deliberations, he at length embarked to join Pompey, who had been obliged to quit Italy some time before, and was then at Dyrrachium; and he arrived safely in the camp with his son, his brother, and his nephew, thus committing the fortunes of his whole family to the issue of the cause. After the battle of Pharsalia, in which Pompey was defeated, Cicero returned into Italy, and was afterwards received into great favour by Caesar, who had now been declared dictator the second time, with Mark Antony as his master of horse. We may easily imagine, what indeed we find from his letters, that he was not a little disconcerted at the thoughts of an interview with Caesar, and the indignity of presenting himself before a conqueror against whom he had been in arms; for although, upon many accounts, he had reason to expect a kind reception from Caesar, yet he hardly thought his life, he says, worth begging, since what was given by a master might always be taken away again at pleasure. But at their meeting he had no occasion to say or do any thing below his dignity; for Caesar no sooner saw him than he alighted, ran to embrace him, and walked with him alone, conversing very familiarly, for several furlongs.

Cicero, now in his sixty-first year, was at length forced to part with his wife Terentia, whose humour and conduct had long been disagreeable to him. She was a woman of an imperious and turbulent spirit; and though he had borne her perverseness in the vigour of health, and the prosperous state of his fortunes, yet, in declining life, and soured by a continual succession of mortifications from abroad, the want of ease and quiet at home became no longer tolerable to him. But he was immediately oppressed by a new and most cruel affliction, the death of his beloved daughter Tullia, who died in childbed soon after her divorce from her third husband Dolabella. She was about thirty-two years old at the time of her death; and, by the few hints which are left of her character, she appears to have been an excellent and admirable woman. She was most affectionately and piously attentive to her father, and, to the usual graces of her sex, added the more solid accomplishments of knowledge and polite letters, which qualified her to be the companion and delight of his age, and made her justly esteemed not only as one of the best, but the most learned, of thç Roman laxlies. His affliction for the death of this daughter was so great, that to shun all company as much as he could, he removed to Atticus’s house, where he lived chiefly in his library, turning over every book he could meet with on the subject of moderating grief. But finding his residence here too public, and being exposed to more society than he was able to bear, he retired to Astura, one of his seats near Antium; a little island on the Latian shore, at the mouth of a river of the same name, and covered with wood and groves cut into shady walks, forming a scene altogether the fittest to indulge melancholy, and to afford a free vent, to affliction. “Here,” says he to Atticus, “1 live without the speech of man. Every morning early I hide myself in the thickest of the wood, and never come out till the evening. Next to yourself, nothing is so dear to me as this solitude; and my whole conversation is with my books.” Indeed his whole time was employed in little else than reading and writing, during Caesar’s administration, which he could never cheerfully submit to; and it was within this period that he drew up one of the gravest of those philosophical pieces which are still extant in his works.

Upon the death of Caesar, Octavius, his nephew and heir, coming into Italy, was presented to Cicero by Hirtius and Pansa, with the strongest professions on the part of the young man that he would be governed entirely by his direction. Indeed Cicero thought it necessary to cherish and encourage Octavius, if for nothing else, to keep him at a distance from Antony; but he could not yet be persuaded to enter heartily into his affairs. He suspected his youth and want of experience, and that he had not strength enough to deal with Antony; and, above all, that he had no good disposition towards the conspirators. He thought it impossible he should ever be a friend to them; and indeed he was persuaded, that if ever he obtained the ascendency, his uncle’s acts would be more violently enforced, and his death more cruelly revenged, than even by Antony himself. Accordingly, when Cicero at last consented to unite himself to Octavius’s interests, it was with no other view than to arm him with a power sufficient to control[7:6:694] Antony, yet so checked and limited, that he should not be able to oppress the republic.

In the midst of all this political bustle he still prosecuted his studies with his usual application; and, besides some philosophical pieces, now finished his book of Offices, or the Duties of Man, for the use of his son. However, he paid constant attention to public affairs, and missed no opportunities, but on the contrary did every thing that human prudence could suggest, for the restoration of the republic; indeed all the vigour with which the last effort was made in its behalf, was entirely owing to his counsels and authority. This appears from the memorable Philippics which from time to time he published against Antony, as well as from other monuments of antiquity. But all was in vain; for although Antony’s army was entirely defeated at the siege of Modena, and many people were in consequence led to imagine that the war was at an end, and the liberty of Rome established, yet the death of the consuls Pansa and Hirtius in that action gave a fatal blow to all Cicero s schemes, and proved the immediate cause of the ruin of the republic.

Octavius having humbled the senate to his mind, marched towards Gaul to meet Antony and Lepidus, who had already passed the Alps, and brought their armies into Italy, in order to have a personal interview with him, which, in fact, had been privately concerted for settling the terms of a triple league, and dividing the power and provinces of Italy among themselves. The place appointed for this interview was a small island about two miles from Bononia, formed by the river Rhenus, which runs near that c∙ityt Here they met, and spent three days in close conference, adjusting the plan of their accommodation; and the last thing they settled was the list of a proscription of their common or individual enemies. This, as the writers tell us, occasioned much difficulty and warm contests among them, till each in his turn consented to sacrifice some of his best friends to the revenge and resentment of his colleagues. Cicero was at his Tusculan villa when he first received the news of the proscription, and of his being included in it at the instigation and to satisfy the vengeance of Antony. It was the design of the triumvirate to keep it a secret, if possible, till the very moment of execution, in order to surprise those whom they had destined to destruction, before they were aware of their danger, or had time to effect their escape. But some of Cicero’s friends found means to give him early notice of this infamous compact, upon which he set forward to the sea-coast, with the design of transporting himself beyond reach of his enemies. There, finding a vessel ready, he immediately embarked; but the winds being adverse, and the sea uneasy to him, after he had sailed about two leagues along the coast, he was obliged to land, and spend the night on shore. By the importunity of his servants, however, he was forced on board again; but he soon afterwards landed at a country-seat of his, a mile from the shore, weary of life, and declaring he was resolved to die in that country which he had so often saved. Here he slept soundly for some time, till his servants once more forced him away in a litter towards the ship, having heard that he was pursued by Antony’s assassins. They had scarcely departed when the assassins arrived at his house, and, perceiving that he had fled, immediately pursued and overtook him in a wood near the shore. Their leader was one Popilius Lenas, a tribune of the army, whose life Cicero had formerly defended and saved. As soon as the soldiers appeared, the servants prepared to defend their master’s life at the hazard of their own; but Cicero commanded them to set him down and make no resistance. The assassins soon cut off his head and his hands, with which they returned to Rome as the most agreeable present to their savage and remorseless employer. Antony, who was then at Rome, received them with extreme joy, rewarded the murderers with a large sum of money, and ordered the head to be fixed upon the rostra between the two hands,—a sad spectacle to the city, and which drew tears from every eye.

If we take an impartial survey of Cicero’s conduct and principles, avowed in his own epistolary correspondence, and trace him through all the labyrinths of his contradictory letters, we shall perhaps find more to blame than to admire; and discover that the desire of advancing his fortunes, and making himself a name, were, from his outset in life, the chief objects he had in view. The good of his country, and the dictates of a steady unyielding virtue, were not, as in Brutus and Cato, the constant springs of his actions. The misfortunes which befel him after his consulship developed his character, and showed him in his true colours: from that time to his death, pusillanimity, irresolution, and unworthy repining, tainted his judgment, and perplexed every step he attempted to take. He flattered Pompey and cringed to Caesar, while in his private letters he abused both alternately and impartially. He acknowledges, in a letter to his friend Atticus, that, although he was at present determined to support the cause of Rome and liberty, and to bear misfortune like a philosopher, there was one thing which would gain him over to the triumvirs, and that was their procuring for him the vacant augurship; so pitiful was the bribe to which he would have sacrificed his honour, his opinions, and the commonwealth.

Cicero’s death happened on the 7th of December, in the sixty-fourth year of his age, about ten days after the settlement of the first triumvirate. As an orator he is thus characterized by a popular writer: “In all his orations his art is conspicuous. He begins commonly with a regular exordium, and with much address prepossesses the hearers, and studies to gain their affections. His method is clear, and his arguments are arranged with exact propriety. In a superior clearness of method, he has an advantage over Demosthenes. Every thing appears in its proper place. He never tries to move till he has attempted to convince; and in moving, particularly the softer passions, he is highly successful. No one ever knew the force of words better than Cicero. He rolls them along with the greatest beauty and magnificence; and in the structure of his sentences is eminently curious and exact. He is always full and flowing, never abrupt. He amplifies every thing; yet though his manner is generally diffuse, it is often happily varied and accommodated to the subject. When an important public object roused his mind, and demanded indignation and force, he departs considerably from that loose and declamatory manner to which he at other times is addicted, and becomes very forcible and vehement This great orator, however, is not without his defects. In most of his orations there is too much art, even carried to a degree of ostentation. He seems often desirous of obtaining admiration rather than of operating conviction. He is sometimes, therefore, showy rather than solid, and diffuse where he ought to have been urgent. His sen-tenςcs are always round and sonorous. They cannot be accused of monotony, since they possess variety of cadence; but from too great a fondness for magnificence, he is on some occasions deficient in strength. Though the services which he had performed to his country 7 were very considerable, yet he is too much his own panegyrist. Ancient manners, which imposed fewer restraints on the side of decorum, may in some degree excuse, but cannot entirely justify, his vanity.”

There have been many editions of all Cicero’s pieces, and many also of his whole works. Their multiplicity is so great that we can only refer those who may wish for [7:6:695]information in regard to them, to the works which have been published on the bibliography of the classics, particularly Dibdin’s fourth edition. We may, however, mention shortly some of the most useful editions. These are, the edition of his treatises on Oratory, printed in usum Delphini, in 2 vols. 4to, in 1687; of his Letters, by Graevius, published in 1677, in 2 vols. 8vo; of his Orations, also by Graevius, published in 1699, in 6 vols. 8vo; and of his Philosophical Works, by Rath, published in 1808, in 6 vols. 8vo. One of the best editions of his whole works is that of Olivet, published at Paris in 1742, in 9 vols. 4to. The beautiful edition published at Glasgow in 1749, in 20 vols. 12mo, is a reprint of that of Olivet. Among the other editions of note, may be mentioned that of Manutianus, which is the editio princeps, Mediol. fol. 1498, 4 vols.; that of Paul Manutius, which is deservedly held in high estimation, Venet. 1540-41, 10 vols.; that of R. Stephanus, Paris, 1543, 8 vols.; that of Elzevir, beautiful and correct, exhibiting the improved text of Gruter, Lugd. Bat. 1642, 10 vols.; those of Enesti, Lipsiae, 1737, Hal. Sax. 1758-74, one in 5 vols. and the last in 8; and the Bipont edition, which professes to be formed on the basis of the most popular ones, without the introduction of either conjecture or novelty, 1780, 13 vols. In any future edition of the whole works of Cicero must be included the recovered portions or fragments of the celebrated treatise on government (De Iiepublica), for which the world is indebted to the patient labour and sagacity of Signor Angelo Mai, librarian of the Vatican, formerly of the Ambrosian library at Milan. In a palimpsest volume, containing various treatises of St Augustin, this learned and ingenious person found that the prior writing, of much greater antiquity, had consisted of the long-lost books of Cicero De Pepublica, of which nothing had been known in modern times, except the few fragments which had been preserved in the writings of Macrobius, Lactantius, Augustin, Nonius, and others. From these rescribed pages, a very considerable part of the first and second books of this interesting treatise was found so perfect as to be almost completely recovered by Signor Mai; and this he was enabled to publish in 1821, with copious notes and illustrations, with an accurate notice of all the chasms occurring from the loss of original leaves, and with such a restoration of the four remaining books as could be made from the less perfect fragments of the manuscript, and from the remains collected by Ligonius and other critics. This is perhaps the most valuable contribution which has been made to classical literature in modern times; and it is sufficient to immortalize the learned, sagacious, and indefatigable scholar to whom we are indebted for it; consisting, as it does, of no inconsiderable portion of that treatise, which the contemporaries of the Roman orator and statesman all agreed in regarding as his masterpiece.