people did around Chrysostom in Antioch.  He amused like an actor, and instructed like a sage.  His sentences are not short, terse, epigrammatic, and direct, but elaborate and artificial.  Yet with all his arts of eloquence his soul, fired with great sentiments, rose in its inspired fervor above even the melody of voice, the rhythm of language, and the vehemence of action.  A listener, who was not a critic, might fancy it was gesture, voice, and language combined; but, after all, it was the man communicating his soul to those who hung upon his lips, and securing conviction by his sincerity and appeals to conscience.  He must have had a natural gift for oratory, aside from his learning and accomplishments and rhetorical arts,—­a talent very rare and approaching to creative genius.  But to his natural gifts—­like Luther, or Henry Clay, born an orator—­he added marvellous attainments.  He had a most retentive memory.  He was versed in the whole history of the world.  He was always ready with apt illustrations, which gave interest and finish to his discourses.  He was the most industrious and studious man of his age.  His attainments were prodigious.  He was master of all the knowledge then known, like Gladstone of our day.  He was not so learned a man as Varro; but Varro’s works have perished, as the great monuments of German scholars are perhaps destined to perish, for lack of style.  Cicero’s style embalmed his thoughts and made them imperishable.  No writer is immortal who is not an artist; Cicero was a consummate artist, and studied the arrangement of sentences, like the historian Tacitus and the Grecian Thucydides.

But greater than as an artist was he in the loftiness of his mind.  He appealed to what is noblest in the soul.  Transcendent eloquence ever “raises mortals to the skies” and never “pulls angels down.”  Love of country, love of home, love of friends, love of nature, love of law, love of God, is brought out in all his discourses, exalting the noblest sentiments which move the human soul.  He was the first to give to the Latin language beauty and artistic finish.  He added to its richness, copiousness, and strength; he gave it music.  For style alone he would be valued as one of the immortal classics.  All men of culture have admired it, from Augustine to Bossuet, and acknowledged their obligations to him.  We accord to the great poets the formation of languages,—­Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare; but I doubt if either Virgil or Horace contributed to the formation of the Latin language more than Cicero.  Certainly they have not been more studied and admired.  In every succeeding age the Orations of Cicero have been one of the first books which have been used as textbooks in colleges.  Is it not something to have been one of the acknowledged masters of human composition?  What a great service did Cicero render to the education of the Teutonic races!  Whatever the Latin language has done for the modern world, Cicero comes in for a large share of the glory.  More is preserved of his writings than of any other writer of antiquity.