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cxlv., 9.) Mercy is little heeded or valued by a thoughtless world. On the part of holy persons it is appropriated and prayed for in the measure of their hopes and desires. "Let thy mercy, O Lord, be upon us, according as we hope in thee." (Psa. xxxiii., 22.) So we think the apostle Paul distinguished those to whom mercy is open and offered, from those who are its happy partakers. The righteousness of God is "unto all, and upon all them that believe " -unto all in the free offer, and, in its happy effect upon all them that believe.

There is hereditary benefit in religion. "And his righteousness unto children's children: to such as keep his covenant and to those that remember his commandments to do them." A word is exchanged here, but without affecting the strength of the passage. It is not said that his mercy is upon children's children, but that his righteousness is unto them. He faithfully fulfils to children promises made in their behalf to the fathers."Beloved, for the fathers' sakes." The allusion is to the covenant made with patriarchal men. There was an entail of mercy reaching to a long succession. Parties are expressly named, covering three generations, but intending more. First, "them that fear him," next, their "children," and then, their "children's children," understood without limitation. Exactness belongs to justice, which reaches" to the third and fourth generation.' Mercy has wider range, and longer action. It covers a thousand generations. See Deut. vii., 9; 1 Chron, xvi., 15.

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Are Gentile Christians warranted to hope for blessing on their offspring on the ground of descent? Is a Christian pedigree any foundation of benefit? We think so. It it both our duty and our privilege to look for the entail of holy character. To be concerned for ourselves alone is a reprehensible remissness. "What must I do to be saved?" was a question that received a broader answer than was expected. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, and thy house." If but one parent is in a state of grace, there is a claim of advantage for the family. "For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now are they holy." 1 Cor. vii. 14. Personal negligence may forego all this benefit, and rob the heirs of the noble heritage. This is intimated by the careful wording of the eighteenth verse, "To such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember his commandments to do them." Godly parents should be hopeful, and file their prayers in heaven, with a view to this grand result. Their children should be careful to tread in their believing footsteps. So shall they secure the inheritance which "a good man leaveth to his children's children." The mercy which is from everlasting to everlasting keeps its eye

upon the perished grass and flowers that died in hope. It will revive them to life and glory; not in their old place, which knows them no more, but in a loftier position, where they will know no blight or decay. T. G.

ART. IX.-CICERO AND DEMOSTHENES CONTRASTED.

WITH

ITH no author in antiquity have we a more familiar acquaintance than we have with Cicero. And unhappily, it may be added, no author has ever suffered more by our familiarity. Of Demosthenes we know with certainty little, and that little is all in his favour. The collection of Cirero's letters, which time has left us, forms a stereoscopic view of the writer's habits and dispositions, for the purposes of characterization, unequalled in literature. Perhaps the work that comes nearest to them in modern time is the Epistolary Essays of Montaigne. As might be inferred, we have no affection for the character of Cicero. He certainly is not a man after our heart. Plutarch, according to his fashion, has drawn an ingenious parallel in his destiny and that of Demosthenes. He has confined it to their political careers. There the parallel begins, and there it most assuredly ends. Everything else about them must be illustrated by contrast. In their moral, as in their idiosyncrasies, they are wide as the poles asunder. There was something of the modern Greek in Cicero, tricky, time-serving, and specious. There was something of the old Roman about Demosthenes, firm, patriotic, undaunted against odds. The emphasis on the to prepon, which runs through his works, seasoning and flavouring them with an honest piquancy, is remarkable. His simplicity, indeed, belonged to the heroic ages. His generation could not understand a man whose whole intelligence was exhausted in identifying the moral and the virtuous with the political, or rather in substituting the one motive for the other. It speaks well for his noble reliance on, his hearty belief and confidence in, the better part of his nation. But, had it not been their interest to appear disinterested, it is to be feared his system would have damned him as a politician. That the Thebans should forget their enmities and the Athenians their defeat on moral grounds, was an idea that could only have imposed on the sensitive soul of an orator, flattered by his own warmth into the conviction. The arms of Philip had more to do with it than the ethics of Demosthenes. With Cicero, on the other hand, expediency, as a principle of action, was all in all. A man so egotistic could have had no sublimer rule of conduct. His egotism was, in truth, disgusting. It certainly is better founded than that of Falstaff; but it is quite as intrusive. It insinuates

itself at every odd moment. When it is not arrogant, it is affected. When it does not strut, it creeps. The reader cannot enjoy the familiar gossip of the letter-writer without being interrupted by the purple of the Consul. We never lose sight of the man who put Cataline to flight, and saved the capitol. The boast is doubtless justifiable, and in a modest man would not have been without a well-earned gracefulness. But Cicero had not a grain of modesty in his whole composition. He was habitually vain, and everything that he said or did was adulterated by his vanity. His love of his country was of a peculiar kind. He certainly possessed it, but it was not disinterested. He loved the welfare of his country because it involved his own welfare. Its triumphs had been his triumphs. All his personal glory had been associated with the defeat of its enemies and the success of its* friends. Hence a less vain man than Cicero might have imposed on himself, might have mistaken the real motives of his patriotism. This self-delusion was all that distinguished him for the better from the men who would sooner have seen their country sink, provided their mullet-ponds were safe. His selfishness leaks out from a hundred little imprudent apertures in his correspondence. It was by serving his country that he had gained his authority in the senate-house and his figure at the bar. It was by continuing to serve his country that he could avoid the mortification he so much dreaded, that six hundred years hence Pompey should be better known than himself. This dread of extinction displays itself to a painful degree in his absence in Syria. Though that government justly authorized his self-congratulation, and the congratulation of his friends, he was miserable. And why was he miserable? Not because Pacorus had crossed the Euphrates with an army of Parthians, but because Cicero is determining causes at Laodicea while Plotius is pleading in the Forum; not because Cicero is at the head of two legions, but because Pompey is at the head of an army. His vanity made him the victim of every one who took the pains to impose upon him. The solemn trifler, Pompey, the astute Cæsar, courted and won him by turns. On the other hand, his busy diplomacy gave him the semblance of imposing on others. He flattered his flatterers. He fawned upon Cæsar. fawned upon Cæsar's murderer, Brutus, and next he fawned upon Cæsar's heir, Octavius. He flattered Antony, yet he acknowledged it as a great omission that Antony did not suffer on the Ides of March. He flattered Dolabella, though he could not refrain from owning that he hated him. A good deal of this inconsistency, we believe, must be put down to any other feeling than that of deliberate villany. It was probably a compound of that morbid sensibility that would have urged Quinctius to falsify history, and that morbid fear that attempted to urge Atticus to repudiate one of

He then

*

his early orations for him. He was always vacillating between a consideration for the safety of his life and a consideration for the safety of his reputation. He fled as soon as he thought it dangerous to remain. He returned as soon as his friends ridiculed him for flying. His whole conduct presents a strange divorce between the philosopher and the statesman, between the man of letters and the man of action. He wrote against glory, and was the slave of it. He wrote about the philosophy of consolation, and he was inconsolable. His affectation of content, indeed, was marvellously strong, but it only helped to render his discontent more palpable. Instead of the consul who braved the daggers of Clodius, we have nothing but a dejected old driveller, half-stifled with rheum and tears, and half-choked with cursing the day of his own birth. He would not be comforted. Never was a man oppressed with such a weight of calamity. Never had a man more reason to wish for death. He would not see his brother, because he would not have his brother see his inexpressible misery. Yet in the midst of all this, the assumption of the man is marvellous. The expressions remind us of Bolingbroke, as, indeed, they must remind anybody who ever compared the letters to Atticus with the letter to Pope. He had given up the world. He intended to study, to bequeath himself to philosophy, to the nine Muses. † Indifference was a greater comforter than hope. He had no curiosity left, Though each remove from Rome extracted a more pitiable protest. and the courier who did not bring a letter full of gossip from his friend, was sure to take back one full of complaint and remonstrance. The least change in fortune rouses him. The repeal of his banishment puts him into the other extreme. In an instant all his resolutions are gone. The tears are dried up. Sunshine peeps out on the face that had relinquished hope. And in a little while no one can trace the philosopher or the exile in the correspondent who fills his letters with delirious accounts how all Brundusium rang with acclamations at his approach, how all Rome, whose greeting was worth having, turned out to greet him, how the gates of the city and the stairs of the public temples, up to the very capitol, thronged with shouting masses, eager to welcome the "Father of his country."

Demosthenes is egotistic. But his is an egotism of another kind from Cicero's. It was singularly unobtrusive and timid. He says himself that the mere thought of talking of oneself made him shrink as from a vulgar and offensive artifice. Only once does he recapitulate his past services to his country, and that was for the purpose of authorising and justifying a renewed offer of service. What he had said on former occasions would make them appreciate better what he had to say now. And if there is any vanity * Lib. 16, iii. Ep. † Eph. v. + Or. to Peace.

in the instances he proceeds to enumerate, his conclusion would more than apologise for it. It at once expresses the modesty and the high sense of morality of Demosthenes. If he had shown greater foresight in these instances of his, he meant not to boast. He ascribed it to no superior sagacity of his own. There were but two sources by which he pretended to anticipate the future— fortune, that beats the ingenuity of man, and contradicts his expectations, and an honest and just estimate of things, which kept the obscuring filth of lucre from his political discernment.

In the literary merits of the two great actors there is a still greater contrast. Quintilian's criticism, that nothing can be added to Cicero, nothing can be taken from Demosthenes, is one of those vague, unmeaning antitheses that sometimes disfigures criticism. It has been a great favourite; and if we recollect rightly, it has been pilfered by a great critic of the last century to distinguish the characteristics of Dryden and Pope. To extract any positive idea of their oratorical excellence from it, to arrive even at any comparative dimensions of their intellectual stature, would be impossible. It would be just as possible to ascertain the physical proportions of two men, one of whom should be depicted as taller than Tom Thumb, and the other not so tall as the Norfolk Giant. Though Quintilian's criticism is thus defective, it would be scarcely worth while at this late hour to supply its deficiencies. The style of the two authors varies with their characters. Cicero the pleader is Cicero the consul still-the man who loves to hear his name echoed in the market-place, the official enamoured of the gewgaws of office, the flatteries of obsequious clients, the plaudits of a wondering senate. Every startling turn, every happy repartee, is evidently intended as a personal demonstration, an affidavit of ability on the part of the speaker. Like the language of Bayes, his language aims at elevating and surprising. The attention of the hearer is at once attracted from the matter to the man. His complaint, that Demosthenes did not fill his ears, suggests at once his own tastes and Demosthenes' manner. In the dazzling fence of rhetoric he was far more scientific than the Grecian. He uses every fence that art supplies with diligent dexterity. Indeed, he may be said not so much to have fulfilled the rules of art as to have multiplied or created them. If critics have drawn their scientific terms and definitions from Aristotle, it is from the magazine of Cicero's works they have taken their exemplications. Demosthenes could never have supplied Quintilian with the illustrative material of his richly-illustrated treatise. To Demosthenes, indeed, the command of the witty and pathetic, and consequently the command of all those postures and turns which the witty and pathetic supply, and which make the deepest impression on the modern reader, was

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