Cicero was now sixty-three, prematurely old, discouraged, and heart-broken.  And yet he braced himself up for one more grand effort,—­for a life and death struggle with Antony, one of the ablest of Caesar’s generals; a demagogue, eloquent and popular, but outrageously cruel and unscrupulous, and with unbridled passions.  Had it not been for his infatuated love of Cleopatra, he probably would have succeeded to the imperial sceptre, for it was by the sword that he too sought to suppress the liberties of the Senate and people.  Against him, as the enemy of his country, Cicero did not scruple to launch forth the most terrible of his invectives.  In thirteen immortal philippics—­some of which, however, were merely written and never delivered, after the fashion of Demosthenes, with whom as an orator and a patriot he can alone be compared—­he denounced the unprincipled demagogue and general with every offensive epithet the language afforded,—­unveiling his designs, exposing his forgeries, and proving his crimes.  Nobler eloquence was never uttered, and wasted, than that with which Cicero pursued, in passionate vengeance, the most powerful and the most unscrupulous man in the Roman Empire.  And Cicero must have anticipated the fate which impended over him if Antony were not decreed a public enemy.  But the protests of the orator were in vain.  He lived to utter them, as a witness of truth; and nothing was left to him but to die.

Of course Antony, when he became Triumvir,—­when he made a bargain that he never meant to keep with Octavius and Lepidus for a division of the Empire between them,—­would not spare such an enemy as Cicero.  The broken-hearted patriot fled mechanically, with a vacillating mind, when his proscription became known to him,—­now more ready to die than live, since all hope in his country’s liberties was utterly crushed.  Perhaps he might have escaped to some remote corner of the Empire.  But he did not wish for life, any more than did Socrates when summoned before his judges.  Desponding, uncertain, pursued, he met his fate with the heroism of an ancient philosopher.  He surrendered his wearied and exhausted body to the hand of the executioner, and his lofty soul to the keeping of that personal and supreme God in whom he believed as firmly as any man, perhaps, of Pagan antiquity.  And surely of him, more than of any other Roman, could it be said,—­as Sir Walter Scott said of Pitt, and as Gladstone quoted, and applied to Sir Robert Peel,—­

     “Now is the stately column broke,
     The beacon light is quenched in smoke;
     The trumpet’s silver voice is still,
     The warder silent on the hill.”

With the death—­so sad—­of the most illustrious of the Romans whose fame was not earned on the battlefield, I should perhaps close my lecture.  Yet it would be incomplete without a short notice of those services which—­as statesman, orator, and essayist—­he rendered to his country and to future ages and nations.