Though we have no authority to tell us how his condition of life became what it was, it is necessary that we should understand that condition if we are to get a clear insight into his life.

Of that condition we have ample evidence.

He commenced his career as a youth upon whose behalf nothing was spared, and when he settled himself in Rome, with the purport of winning for himself the highest honors of the Republic, he did so with the means of living like a nobleman.
But the point on which it is most necessary to insist is this: that while so many--I may almost say all around him in his own order--were unscrupulous as to their means of getting money, he kept his hands clean.

The practice then was much as it is now.

A gentleman in our days is supposed to have his hands clean; but there has got abroad among us a feeling that, only let a man rise high enough, soil will not stick to him.