the perfect orator; a knowledge of the human mind was one of his essential qualifications. Nor could he conceive of real eloquence without it; for his definition of eloquence is, "wisdom speaking fluently."[1] But such studies were also suited to his own natural tastes. And as years passed on, and he grew weary of civil discords and was harassed by domestic troubles, the great orator turns his back upon the noisy city, and takes his parchments of Plato and Aristotle to be the friends of his councils and the companions of his solitude, seeking by their light to discover Truth, which Democritus had declared to be buried in the depths of the sea.
Yet, after all, he professes to do little more than translate. So conscious is he that it is to Greece that Rome is indebted for all her literature, and so conscious, also, on the part of his countrymen, of what he terms "an arrogant disdain for everything national," that he apologises to his readers for writing for the million in their mother-tongue. Yet he is not content, as he says, to be "a mere interpreter." He thought that by an eclectic process—adopting and rearranging such of the doctrines of his Greek masters as approved: themselves to his own judgment—he might make his own work a substitute for theirs. His ambition is to achieve what he might well regard as the hardest of tasks—a popular treatise on philosophy; and he has certainly succeeded. He makes no pretence to originality; all he can do is, as he expresses it, "to array Plato in a Latin dress," and "present this stranger
- ↑ "Copiose loquens sapientia."
