consults one of them as to whether it would be advisable for him to accompany the reading of his freedman with dumb show; or celebrates the praises of his own oratory; or relates how a provincial, hearing that an eminent literary man was at table, exclaimed, "It must be Tacitus or Pliny!" Even Mr Froude, we think, has not made sufficient allowance for the terrible disadvantage which Cicero sustains, relatively to his greatest contemporaries, by being known to us as he was known to his own innermost circle. The character of Cato is less complex, so far as history reveals it, but not, perhaps, less difficult to judge fairly. Mr Froude says—as we think, with good reason—that Cato's animosity to Cæsar "had been originally the natural antipathy which a man of narrow understanding instinctively feels for a man of genius. It had been converted by perpetual disappointment into a monomania, and Cæsar had become to him the incarnation of every quality and every principle which he most abhorred." Much of the truth, though not the whole truth, is told in these words:—
"Ultimus Romanorum has been the epitaph which posterity has written on the tomb of Cato. Nobler Romans than he lived after him; and a genuine son of the old Republic would never have consented to surrender an imperial province to a barbarian prince. But at least he was an open enemy. He would not, like his nephew Brutus, have pretended to be Cæsar's friend, that he might the more conveniently drive a dagger into his side."
This is not Cato's highest praise. His understanding was, indeed, narrow; his political animosities
