be the first to protect a woman if she were in danger? which would respect her most if she deserved it? or which would appreciate her charms most if she possessed such? Assuming the officers to be gentlemen properly so called, it is to them the distinction would be awarded in each case; but precisely because they possess gallantry, because they are gentlemen actuated by a sense of honor, they would remember that they have a grave duty to perform-a duty to society, as well as to the government in whose service they are; they would also remember that their respect, esteem, and admiration are due not to the bloodthirsty or base of the sex, but to the virtuous and good, who would have every right to reproach them if they neglected to make that distinction. ART. V—1. M. T. Ciceronis Opera Omnia. Parisiis, 1827-32. 2. B. G. Niebuhr's Lectures on the History of Rome. Edited by L. SCHMITZ. London, 1849. 3. T. Mommsen: Römische Geschichte. Berlin, 1856-9. 4. Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire. Vols. 1-3. New York, 1863-4. 5. Cicero's Letters to several of his Friends; translated by W. MELMOTH. Letters to Atticus; translated by Dr. HEBERDEN. Life, by Dr. MIDDLETON. London, 1848. 6. Cicero. By THOMAS DE QUINCEY. 7. Life and Times of Cicero. By W. FORSYTH. London, 1864. CHARACTER may be called the general expression of spirit. The body has its forms and features, which we unconsciously gather up into a certain unity expressing to us the entire outward man, and the features of the soul naturally blend and pass over into a harmony of their own. This generalization we seize, or attempt to seize, as it represents to us the very essence of the inner man. We name it character. It is the faithful. miniature projected by the hidden soul— the brief though full utterance of the moral nature. It is, in short, the sum total of the meaning of the man. But there is more in character than in the man himself. Its roots go down into every soil he treads; its juices borrow from every stream he crosses. Each of us is, like Ulysses, a part of all that he has met. We are the resultant of two forces -the innate tendency and the outward shaping. The wax is moulded, the loaf is leavened, the foundation is built on, the vine grows towards the light; and there comes something different. At the bottom there is temperament; and above, and through this, is circumstance. Which is the greater? Proverbs, which embody the essence of vulgar wisdom arising out of the average experience of life, are Janus-faced, looking both ways. The voice of philosophy varies according to the mouthpiece of the hour. History is the record of circumstance and men, as biography is the story of circumstance and a man. But history is made by varying interpretation, to lean now this way under the weight of law, now that way under some human impulse. To-day it admits only law, science, circumstance, abstractions; to-morrow it is the sum of biographies, and tells us of the eternal might of temperament, will, and character. While talent, learning, and action are, in a measure, external to the man, character is wholly a part of himself. In the one case there is accretion, in the other a natural growth, showing personality and spontaneous life. Lacordaire used to maintain that the great want of our time is character. There is too much of culture and ornament, but not enough of the flavor of the individual. Instead of building up from without, we should unfold from within, aiming first of all to vivify, strengthen, and enrich character. History testifies to an aggregate character of men in the mass as well as to individual character. Each race has a way of its own, which we can all see and feel, though it is impossible always to define it. This is what Voltaire termed the genius of a nation, meaning whatever distinguishes one people from another. We fuse all that is peculiar into an average, which thenceforward stands for the spirit of the nation. It is a true though ideal conception of national character. Probably we never find our conception fully embodied in any individual; nor do we ever see in nature any object conformed throughout to its standard. Take, for example, the old Roman character. We look upon it as forming a certain national type. We have a conception, more or less vivid and complete, of a certain composite standard, which is real if taken piecemeal, but fictitious as a whole. Each of us has in his mind's inventory of the chief elements in the make-up of the ideal Roman. It was pre-eminently the masculine character of the world. Built of a tough granite, it did not admit the orna eye an ment and finish which we meet elsewhere. Its traits were all positive and strongly marked. It revealed no negatives and half-shading. Stoical in suffering, unscrupulous in means, selfishly aggressive in all its aims, cruel in execution, sceptical in regard to the unseen, resolute, self-centred, and unfeeling, it was a character admirably shaped for action, for pushing its way through the world, and doing the real business of life. The nation naturally took its place as the proper pioneer and road-breaker for our modern civilization. Never was there a race so thoroughly practical, so devoted to material interests, and with such a common-sense, hard-headed way of looking at things. They wrote themselves down in deeds, not words; they never originated an idea. They contributed nothing to the development of any, if we except the two ideas of law and duty. And their idea of law was rather legality and formalism than pure justice and right. Their idea of duty, it is true, rose to a majesty never before equalled; but it was the duty of the citizen, not of the individual. The man was altogether sunk in the state. So that there was very little of our modern casuistry as to questions lying between the man and his conscience the first duty and the last was self-abnegation towards government. : Such, in the main, were the outlines of the Roman character; yet where can we see them perfectly defined? Whom can we take for the typical Roman? Not Cæsar; for he was a universal man, who would overfill any standard made up of averages. Not Pompey surely; for his constant study of effect, his tricks of acting, and his vainglorious self-consciousness were wholly alien to the simplicity and directness of the national character. Set off with the pomp and circumstance of the Orient, he was in spirit and habit far more Asiatic than European. The great Scipio-one of the most peculiar names in history-has come down to us invested with a kind of personal fascination and rare kingliness of character, and an air of large serenity and repose, quite unRoman. He was more and other than pure Roman. Most persons would be inclined to single out the elder or the younger Brutus, or one of the Catos, as completely embodying all the national traits and ideas. But the claims of either Brutus lose much of their force by reason of an unpleasant flavor of charlatanism and of the ad captandum which continues to linger about them, and which in the case of the younger Brutus amounts almost to. positive taint, when taken in connection with his well-known usurious and peculating propensities. The Catos best represent the great central ideas of justice and duty, but they hardly conform to the standard on all sides. The fussiness and old-womanishness of the Censor detract much from the symmetry of his character. And we do not quite like to see an ideal man loaning his wife, or prescribing the suitable diet for a wide circle of friends, or in the guise of an amateur quack, dosing all his kith and kin through their ill turns. The Uticensian, in the midst of a nation remarkable for practical tact and knowledge of men, was noted as a perfectly impracticable and unelastic member of the community. Cicero wrote to Atticus that Cato did much mischief by laying down his dicta as if he were living in the republic of Plato, not in the dregs of Romulus. And Merivale has well described him as "a pedantic politician and a scholastic formalist," one whose character "was a system of elaborate though perhaps unconscious affectations." He was, in fact, a dilution of his great-grandfather, seasoned with some very unpaiatable hobbies. Sulla was more Sybaritic Greek than a Roman. Perhaps Marius represented most completely the entire cycle of the national character regarded in its lowest grade. There was in the man an innate scurviness and dog-in-the-manger spirit anything but heroic, or true to the temper of the people in its higher forms. A knot of such fellows might have fused into a party of roughs, but could never have grown into a nation. What, then, shall we say of Cicero? Can we take him for the true representative Roman? By no means, for, properly speaking, he was hardly Roman at all. He had less of the havor of the soil than any of the national chiefs. Cicero was the Frenchman of antiquity. His whole nature seems to us thoroughly French. He looms before us as the primeval cultured Celt. No other historical Roman, and no Greek, with the possible exception of Alcibiades, had so many purely Celtic traits: at whatever point we meet him, we are constantly and irresistibly reminded of the characteristics of that ancient tribe as described in the old classic writers. In reading his orations, his philosophy, and above all his letters; in dissecting the make-up and temper of the man, his logic saturated with rhetoric, his ready wit, his quick perception, his fickleness, his gusts of passion, his sudden laughter and tears, his verbosity, his lack of endurance, dignity, and consistency, his frivolity and vanity-almost every where, in short, we meet with a peculiar flavor, a certain seasoning, which we of Saxon lineage regard as characteristic of all our Celtic cousins. This quasi-Celtic ingredient is the leaven which leavens the whole loaf. It is an element to which we owe much, for it has contributed largely to give us our thorough knowledge of Cicero. It led him to come out of himself, to deploy all his strength and weakness in the face of the world, and place himself in some sort of personal relation to every one. He had no reticence, no mauvaise honte, no delicacy about making revelations of self. His personality crops out everywhere, for it was his delight to thrust himself before mankind in all sorts of postures and guises. It was a supreme gratification to him to tear down every barrier of reserve between him and his intimates, and then gush forth in the most confiding abandonment of conversational or epistolary intercourse, deluging with the secrets of his soul the friend whom he had happened to buttonhole. He had the French passion for living out of doors, for washing his linen in public, and for making himself the hero and his friends the victims of a memoir, which, however, was never in his case moulded into a systematic treatise, but. made up of fragments scattered hap-hazard on all sides. Yet these piecemeal revelations were no wise inferior to any former dissertation on self made by the best of them: they outlined and filled up the man completely. And so much of all this still remains that we know Cicero to-day almost, as his nearest friends did-intus et in cute. We know him quite as well as we do the Cardinal de Retz, the Duke de St. Simon, and the many other worthies who flourished in the memoir-making days of the old regime. He was, indeed, his own Boswell -a most communicative autobiographer, sending forth always, without let or hindrance, whatever chanced to lie uppermost at the moment. It has been remarked that no one of the ancients could so well stand the severe test which Cicero has afforded of himself, in his Letters, though they convict him of vanity, inconstancy, sordidness, jealousy, malice, selfishness, and timidity. This is undoubtedly true; for, in the matter of practical morality, in freedom from gross vice, and pureness of living, Cicero was far in advance of his contemporaries. His character was more than ordinarily good, yet he was a man of no character. This seeming paradox arises from the sophism always lurking in the word character. In so far as |