“I have pleaded many causes, Caesar—­some, indeed, in association with yourself, while your public career spared you to the courts; but surely I never yet used language of this sort,—­’Pardon him, sirs, he has offended:  he has made a false step:  he did not think to do it; he never will again’.  This is language we use to a father.  To the court it must be,—­’He did not do it:  he never contemplated it:  the evidence is false; the charge is fabricated’.  If you tell me you sit but as the judge of the fact in this case, Caesar,—­if you ask me where and when he served against you,—­I am silent; I will not now dwell on the extenuating circumstances, which even before a judicial tribunal might have their weight.  We take this course before a judge, but I am here pleading to a father.  ’I have erred—­I have done wrong, I am sorry:  I take refuge in your clemency; I ask forgiveness for my fault; I pray you, pardon me’....  There is nothing so popular, believe me, sir, as kindness; of all your many virtues none wins men’s admiration and their love like mercy.  In nothing do men reach so near the gods, as when they can give life and safety to mankind.  Fortune has given you nothing more glorious than the power, your own nature can supply nothing more noble than the will, to spare and pardon wherever you can.  The case perhaps demands a longer advocacy—­your gracious disposition feels it too long already.  So I make an end, preferring for my cause that you should argue with your own heart, than that I or any other should argue with you.  I will urge nothing more than this,—­the grace which you shall extend to my client in his absence, will be felt as a boon by all here present”.

The great conqueror was, it is said, visibly affected by the appeal, and Ligarius was pardoned.

CHAPTER VIII.

MINOR CHARACTERISTICS.

Not content with his triumphs in prose, Cicero had always an ambition—­to be a poet.  Of his attempts in this way we have only some imperfect fragments, scattered here and there through his other works, too scanty to form any judgment upon.  His poetical ability is apt to be unfairly measured by two lines which his opponents were very fond of quoting and laughing at, and which for that reason have become the best known.  But it is obvious that if Wordsworth or Tennyson were to be judged solely by a line or two picked out by an unfavourable reviewer—­say from ‘Peter Bell’ or from the early version of the ’Miller’s Daughter’—­posterity would have a very mistaken appreciation of their merits.  Plutarch and the younger Pliny, who had seen more of Cicero’s poetry than we have, thought highly of it.  So he did himself; but so it was his nature to think of most of his own performances; and such an estimate is common to other authors besides Cicero, though few announce it so openly.  Montaigne takes him to task for this, with more wit, perhaps, than fairness.  “It is no great fault to write