Let us follow him for a while into private life; a pleasanter companionship for us, we confess, than the unstable glories of the political arena at Rome.  In his family and social relations, the great orator wins from us an amount of personal interest and sympathy which he fails sometimes to command in his career as a statesman.  At forty-five years of age he has become a very wealthy man—­has bought for something like L30,000 a noble mansion on the Palatine Hill; and besides the old-fashioned family seat near Arpinum—­now become his own by his father’s death—­he has built, or enlarged, or bought as they stood, villas at Antium, at Formiae, at Pompeii, at Cumae, at Puteoli, and at half-a-dozen other places, besides the one favourite spot of all, which was to him almost what Abbotsford was to Scott, the home which it was the delight of his life to embellish—­his country-house among the pleasant hills of Tusculum.[1] It had once belonged to Sulla, and was about twelve miles from Rome.  In that beloved building and its arrangements he indulged, as an ample purse allowed him, not only a highly-cultivated taste, but in some respects almost a whimsical fancy.  “A mere cottage”, he himself terms it in one place; but this was when he was deprecating accusations of extravagance which were brought against him, and we all understand something of the pride which in such matters “apes humility”.  He would have it on the plan of the Academia at Athens, with its palaestra and open colonnade, where, as he tells us, he could walk and discuss politics or philosophy with his friends.  Greek taste and design were as fashionable among the Romans of that day as the Louis Quatorze style was with our grandfathers.  But its grand feature was a library, and its most valued furniture was books.  Without books, he said, a house was but a body without a soul.  He entertained for these treasures not only the calm love of a reader, but the passion of a bibliophile; he was particular about his bindings, and admired the gay colours of the covers in which the precious manuscripts were kept as well as the more intellectual beauties within.  He had clever Greek slaves employed from time to time in making copies of all such works as were not to be readily purchased.  He could walk across, too, as he tells us, to his neighbour’s, the young Lucullus, a kind of ward of his, and borrow from the library of that splendid mansion any book he wanted.  His friend Atticus collected for him everywhere—­manuscripts, paintings, statuary; though for sculpture he professes not to care much, except for such subjects as might form appropriate decorations for his palaestra and his library.  Very pleasant must have been the days spent together by the two friends—­so alike in their private tastes and habits, so far apart in their chosen course of life—­when they met there in the brief holidays which Cicero stole from the law-courts and the Forum, and sauntered in the shady walks, or lounged in the cool library, in that home of lettered ease, where the busy lawyer and politician declared that he forgot for a while all the toils and vexations of public life.