of the conqueror, was delivered, not “within a few weeks of his murder,” but eighteen months before that event, at a time when Cicero still hoped that Caesar would be moderate.  If Cicero’s Republic was a narrow oligarchy, it was also the only form of constitutional and civilian government which he knew or could imagine.  He failed to preserve it.  He was murdered like Caesar himself.  Neither of them believed that political assassination was a crime.  Cicero’s only regret was that Antony had not been killed with Caesar.  Antony’s chief desire, which he accomplished, was to kill Cicero.  The idea that Cicero was a mere declaimer, who did not count, never occurred either to Caesar or to Antony.  It was left for Professor Mommsen to discover.  Froude, always on the look-out for examples of his theory, or his father’s theory, that orators must be useless and mistaken, seized it with an eager gasp.  An agreeable looseness of treatment pervades the book, and “patricians” appear as wealthy leaders of fashionable society, being in fact a small number of old Roman families, who might be poor, or in trade, and could not legally under the Republic be increased in number, resembling rather a Hindu caste than any institution of Western Christendom.  In Caesar’s time they had almost died out, and the aristocracy of the day was an aristocracy of office.  The book, however, though far from faultless, though in some respects misleading, has a singular fascination, the charm of a picture drawn by the hand of a master with consummate skill.  As an historical study, what the French call une etude, it deserves a very high place, and it contains one sentence which all democrats would do well to learn: 

“Popular forms are possible only when individual men can govern their own lives on moral principles, and when duty is of more importance than pleasure, and justice than material expediency.”

That represents the best side of Carlyle’s teaching; the subordination of material objects, the supremacy of the moral law.  Carlyle, however, did not care for the book, as appears in the following letter from Froude to Lady Derby: 

“April 26th, 1879.—­You are a most kind critic.  If I have succeeded in creating interest in so old a subject my utmost wishes are accomplished.  I am very curious indeed to hear what Lord D. says.  I can guess that he thinks I ought to have said more in defence of the Constitutionalists, and that I have hardly used Cicero.  Carlyle reduced me to the condition of a ’drenched hen’—­to use one of his own images.  He told me that the book was not clear, that ’he got no good of it’—­in fact, that it was ‘a failure.’  It may be a failure, but ‘want of clearness’ is certainly not the cause.  I fancy he wanted something else which he did not find, and he would not give himself the trouble to examine what he did find.”