or were not bound to aid them in their treasonable designs against the state, he was surely thinking of the factions of his own times, and the troublesome brotherhoods which had gathered round Catiline and Clodius.  Be this as it may, the advice which he makes Laelius give to his younger relatives is good for all ages, modern or ancient:  “There is nothing in this world more valuable than friendship”.  “Next to the immediate blessing and providence of Almighty God”, Lord Clarendon was often heard to say, “I owe all the little I know, and the little good that is in me, to the friendships and conversation I have still been used to, of the most excellent men in their several kinds that lived in that age”.

CHAPTER XI.

CICERO’S PHILOSOPHY.

’THE TRUE ENDS OF LIFE’.[1]

Philosophy was to the Roman what religion is to me.  It professed to answer, so far as it might be answered Pilate’s question, “What is truth?” or to teach men, as Cicero described it, “the knowledge of things human and divine”.  Hence the philosopher invests his subject with all attributes of dignity.  To him Philosophy brings all blessings in her train.  She is the guide of life, the medicine for his sorrows, “the fountain-head of all perfect eloquence—­the mother of all good deeds and good words”.  He invokes with affectionate reverence the great name of Socrates—­the sage who had “first drawn wisdom down from heaven”.

[Footnote 1:  ’De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum’.]

No man ever approached his subject more richly laden with philosophic lore than Cicero.  Snatching every leisure moment that he could from a busy life, he devotes it to the study of the great minds of former ages.  Indeed, he held this study to be the duty of the perfect orator; a knowledge of the human mind was one of his essential qualifications.  Nor could he conceive of real eloquence without it; for his definition of eloquence is, “wisdom speaking fluently".[1] But such studies were also suited to his own natural tastes.  And as years passed on, and he grew weary of civil discords and was harassed by domestic troubles, the great orator turns his back upon the noisy city, and takes his parchments of Plato and Aristotle to be the friends of his councils and the companions of his solitude, seeking by their light to discover Truth, which Democritus had declared to be buried in the depths of the sea.

[Footnote 1:  “Copiose loquens sapientia".]

Yet, after all, he professes to do little more than translate.  So conscious is he that it is to Greece that Rome is indebted for all her literature, and so conscious, also, on the part of his countrymen, of what he terms “an arrogant disdain for everything national”, that he apologises to his readers for writing for the million in their mother-tongue.  Yet he is not content, as he says, to be “a mere interpreter”.  He thought that by an