poor verses; but it is a fault not to be able to see how unworthy such poor verses were of his reputation”.  Voltaire, on the other hand, who was perhaps as good a judge, thought there was “nothing more beautiful” than some of the fragments of his poem on ‘Marius’, who was the ideal hero of his youth.  Perhaps the very fact, however, of none of his poems having been preserved, is some argument that such poetic gift as he had was rather facility than genius.  He wrote, besides this poem on ‘Marius’, a ‘History of my Consulship’, and a ‘History of my Own Times’, in verse, and some translations from Homer.

He had no notion of what other men called relaxation:  he found his own relaxation in a change of work.  He excuses himself in one of his orations for this strange taste, as it would seem to the indolent and luxurious Roman nobles with whom he was so unequally yoked.

“Who after all shall blame me, or who has any right to be angry with me, if the time which is not grudged to others for managing their private business, for attending public games and festivals, for pleasures of any other kind,—­nay, even for very rest of mind and body,—­the time which others give to convivial meetings, to the gaming-table, to the tennis-court,—­this much I take for myself, for the resumption of my favourite studies?”

In this indefatigable appetite for work of all kinds, he reminds us of no modern politician so much as of Sir George Cornewall Lewis; yet he would not have altogether agreed with him in thinking that life would be very tolerable if it were not for its amusements.  He was, as we have seen, of a naturally social disposition.  “I like a dinner-party”, he says in a letter to one of his friends; “where I can say just what comes uppermost, and turn my sighs and sorrows into a hearty laugh.  I doubt whether you are much better yourself, when you can laugh as you did even at a philosopher.  When the man asked—­’Whether anybody wanted to know anything?’ you said you had been wanting to know all day when it would be dinner-time.  The fellow expected you to say you wanted to know how many worlds there were, or something of that kind".[1]

[Footnote 1:  These professional philosophers, at literary dinner-parties, offered to discuss and answer any question propounded by the company.]

He is said to have been a great laugher.  Indeed, he confesses honestly that the sense of humour was very powerful with him—­“I am wonderfully taken by anything comic”, he writes to one of his friends.  He reckons humour also as a useful ally to the orator.  “A happy jest or facetious turn is not only pleasant, but also highly useful occasionally;” but he adds that this is an accomplishment which must come naturally, and cannot be taught under any possible system.[1] There is at least sufficient evidence that he was much given to making jokes, and some of them which have come down to us would imply that a Roman audience was not very critical on this point.