applied to the voting-papers of his day, as a testimony in favour of this mode of secret suffrage—­grand words, and wholly untranslatable into anything like corresponding English—­“Tabella vindex tacitae libertatis”—­“the tablet which secures the liberty of silence”.  But knowing so well as Cicero did what was the ordinary character of Roman jurors and Roman voters, and how often this “liberty of silence” was a liberty to take a bribe and to vote the other way, one can almost fancy that we see upon his lips, as he utters the sounding phrase, that playful curve of irony which is said to have been their characteristic expression.[2] Mr. Grote forgot, too, as was well pointed out by a writer in the ’Quarterly Review’,[3] that in the very next sentence the orator is proud to boast that he himself was not so elected to office, but “by the living voices” of his fellow-citizens.

[Footnote 1:  See p. 3.]

[Footnote 2:  No bust, coin, or gem is known which bears any genuine likeness of Cicero.  There are several existing which purport to be such, but all are more or less apocryphal.]

[Footnote 3:  Quart.  Rev., lxi. 522.]

The character of his eloquence may be understood in some degree by the few extracts which have been given from his public speeches; always remembering how many of its charms are necessarily lost by losing the actual language in which his thoughts were clothed.  We have lost perhaps nearly as much in another way, in that we can only read the great orator instead of listening to him.  Yet it is possible, after all, that this loss to us is not so great as it might seem.  Some of his best speeches, as we know—­those, for instance, against Verres and in defence of Milo—­were written in the closet, and never spoken at all; and most of the others were reshaped and polished for publication.  Nor is it certain that his declamation, which some of his Roman rivals found fault with as savouring too much of the florid Oriental type, would have been agreeable to our colder English taste.  He looked upon gesture and action as essential elements of the orator’s power, and had studied them carefully from the artists of the theatre.  There can be no doubt that we have his own views on this point in the words which he has put into the mouth of his “Brutus”, in the treatise on oratory which bears that name.  He protests against the “Attic coldness” of style which, he says, would soon empty the benches of their occupants.  He would have the action and bearing of the speaker to be such that even the distant spectator, too far off to hear, should “know that there was a Roscius on the stage”.  He would have found a French audience in this respect more sympathetic than an English one.[1] His own highly nervous temperament would certainly tend to excited action.  The speaker, who, as we are told, “shuddered visibly over his whole body when he first began to speak”, was almost sure, as he warmed to his work, to throw himself into it with a passionate energy.