THE ASTONISHING activity of Cicero’s intellect made him the greatest essayist, as he was easily the greatest orator of the Roman world. Seneca, who is second only to Cicero as a writer of ethical and philosophical essays, is his inferior both in style and scope. Of Cicero’s prose style it can be said without overstatement, that it so deeply influenced the habits of all writers of good prose after him, that until Carlyle wrote “Sartor Resartus,” no essayist who wished to be taken seriously ventured to break completely away from its tradition of literary art. Its best modern representative among English writers is undoubtedly Macaulay, as no doubt Taine is among French. It is peculiarly a Latin style in harmony with the genius of French and other Latin languages, but having a tendency to give English sentences a larger number of clauses than Saxon syntax allows. Still, every educated writer who writes English at all must almost necessarily write Ciceronian English. Addison almost escaped it, but what might otherwise have been the revolution in English prose resulting from his essays was checked by Dr. Johnson and Gibbon. The great danger of the Ciceronian sentence is diffuseness and obscurity. The writer can put so many subordinate ideas into his subordinate clauses that the reader often finds difficulty in remembering the beginning of the sentence when the end is reached. Against this disadvantage of the Ciceronian sentence is its unequaled merit—the highest possible flexibility, the greatest possible receptiveness as a vehicle for connected and orderly thought. It belongs to the climax of a high civilization, and while, in one sense, it was the style of all educated writers of prose in the Ciceronian age, in another it belongs peculiarly to Cicero and to the mind in him which made him the representative of all that was best in the civilization of Rome. This eminence belongs to him incontestably. One by one other great Roman writers fall back as they are compared with him. In spite of his weaknesses of character, he stands the test which Cato proposed for the greatness of the orator—he is a great writer because fundamentally and essentially he is a good man. His strength of character is made perfect in weakness, but in spite of this weakness shown in vanity, ambition, and cowardice, we can feel when he discusses virtue that it is because he loves it; when he preaches to us of the contempt of death that he himself knows how to die nobly and when he tells us of the duties of citizenship that he did not survive the liberties of his country.

  It is by virtue of such qualities as these rather than by any trick of syntax that he is the master of the Taines and the Macaulays of ages so remote from his own. In their phalanxed sentences as they wheel clause on clause into orderly and irresistible battalions, we feel the commanding presence of that great intellect which, before Clodia’s needle had pierced the tongue that gave it voice to save Rome, had aspired those serene skies from which the vansmen of civilization in all ages are sent down to struggle for the redemption of the earth from a primal and always inherent barbarism.