extemporising at need, but probably trusted little to it on great occasions; while with Demosthenes it was the rule, we are told, never to speak without preparation. Take the oration delivered by Lysias at the Olympian festival, where he is exhorting the assembled Greeks to unite against the common foes of Hellas in Sicily and in Persia. Here the orator is essentially an organ of patriotic opinion, and his highly-wrought address is a finished leading-article, for which the author sought the largest publicity.
In turning from Greece to Rome, we are prepared to find literature holding a different relation towards public opinion. The Greek temperament, with its quick play of thought and fancy, had an instinctive craving to make the sympathy of thoughts continually felt in words, and to accompany action with a running comment of speech. The Roman, as we find him during Rome's earlier career of conquest, was usually content to feel that his action was in conformity with some principle which he had expressed once for all in an institution or a statute. His respect for authority, and his moral earnestness—in a word, his political and social gravity—rendered him independent of the solace which the lively Greek derived from a demonstrated community of feeling. Rome, strong in arms, severe, persistent, offering to people after people the choice of submission or subjugation; Rome, the head of the Latin name, the capital of Italy, the queen of the Mediterranean, the empress of a pacified, because disarmed, world; Rome, who never deemed a war done until
