had been thought to be pointed against the recent victories of Pompey, and to have provoked him to use his influence to get rid of the author.  But this annotation of Cicero’s poetry had not been Piso’s only offence.  He had been consul at the time of the exile, and had given vent, it may be remembered, to the witticism that the “saviour of Rome” might save the city a second time by his absence.  Cicero was not the man to forget it.  The beginning of his attack on Piso is lost, but there is quite enough remaining.  Piso was of a swarthy complexion, approaching probably to the negro type.  “Beast”—­is the term by which Cicero addresses him.  “Beast! there is no mistaking the evidence of that slave-like hue, those bristly cheeks, those discoloured fangs.  Your eyes, your brows, your face, your whole aspect, are the tacit index to your soul".[2]

[Footnote 1:  “Cedant arma togae, concedat laurea linguae".]

[Footnote 2:  Such flowers of eloquence are not encouraged at the modern bar.  But they were common enough, even in the English law-courts, in former times.  Mr. Attorney-General Coke’s language to Raleigh at his trial—­“Thou viper!”—­comes quite up to Cicero’s.  Perhaps the Irish House of Parliament, while it existed, furnished the choicest modern specimens of this style of oratory.  Mr. O’Flanagan, in his ’Lives of the Lord Chancellors of Ireland’, tells us that a member for Galway, attacking an opponent when he knew that his sister was present during the debate, denounced the whole family—­“from the toothless old hag that is now grinning in the gallery, to the white-livered scoundrel that is shivering on the floor".]

It is not possible, within the compass of these pages, to give even the briefest account of more than a few of the many causes (they are twenty-four in number) in which the speeches made by Cicero, either for the prosecution or the defence, have been preserved to us.  Some of them have more attraction for the English reader than others, either from the facts of the case being more interesting or more easily understood, or from their affording more opportunity for the display of the speaker’s powers.

Mr. Fox had an intense admiration for the speech in defence of Caelius.  The opinion of one who was no mean orator himself, on his great Roman predecessor, may be worth quoting: 

“Argumentative contention is not what he excels in; and he is never, I think, so happy as when he has an opportunity of exhibiting a mixture of philosophy and pleasantry, and especially when he can interpose anecdotes and references to the authority of the eminent characters in the history of his own country.  No man appears, indeed, to have had such a real respect for authority as he; and therefore when he speaks on that subject he is always natural and earnest".[1]

[Footnote 1:  Letter to G. Wakefield—­Correspondence, p. 35.]