Page:Essays and Addresses.djvu/293

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springing chiefly from the same source, to the characters of the secondary personages of the drama; these faults are of a graver nature, and ought to receive the author's attention in the next edition of the work. Thus we would suggest that he should consider carefully what Professor Tyrrell urges in the Preface and Introduction to the first volume of his edition of "Cicero's Letters" regarding Cicero's relations to Cæsar, to Clodius, and to Catiline, and regarding the question of Cæsar's complicity in the Catilinarian plot[1]. The estimate of Tiberius Gracchus is hardly, we think, duly appreciative, and the verdict upon Lucullus appears to us unfairly harsh[2]. But it will not be the object of the following pages to examine the questionable points of Mr Froude's work in minute detail. This task has not been neglected by our predecessors in the criticism of the book; and having indicated the nature and bearing of these minor defects, we may therefore pass at once to the consideration of the larger questions which Mr Froude has raised. The general conception of Cæsar's place in history which the "Sketch" unfolds, apart from those merits or

  1. As Professor Tyrrell remarks (and shows in a note on Cic. Ep. I. xii. § 8), evidence is against the tradition of Cicero having defended Catiline on a charge of malversation in Africa; as it is also against the story of Cicero's intimacy with Clodia. Nor, again, is there any reason for referring nosti marinas in Cic. ad Att. i. 16 to an infamous adventure of Clodius.
  2. Pp. 22–24 (where, by the way, Plutarch's account of the breach between Tiberius Gracchus and Scipio Æmilianus is not accurately reproduced), pp. 104, 114, 127, &c.