With his mind fixed from his early days on the ambition of doing something noble with himself, he gave himself up to all kinds of learning.

It was Macaulay, I think, who said of him that the idea of conquering the "omne scibile,"-- the understanding of all things within the reach of human intellect--was before his eyes as it was before those of Bacon.

The special preparation which was, in Cicero's time, employed for students at the bar is also described in the treatise from which I have quoted--the preparation which is supposed to have been the very opposite of that afforded by the "rhetores." "Among ourselves, the youth who was intended to achieve eloquence in the Forum, when already trained at home and exercised in classical knowledge, was brought by his father or his friends to that orator who might then be considered to be the leading man in the city.

It became his daily work to follow that man, to accompany him, to be conversant with all his speeches, whether in the courts of law or at public meetings, so that he might learn, if I might say so, to fight in the very thick of the throng." It was thus that Cicero studied his art.

A few lines farther down, the pseudo-Tacitus tells us that Crassus, in his nineteenth year, held a brief against Carbo; that Caesar did so in his twenty-first against Dolabella; and Pollio, in his twenty-second year, against Cato.[43] In this precocity Cicero did not imitate Crassus, or show an example to the Romans who followed him.