It was his nature to do so, not from any aptitude for deceit, but because he was sanguine and vacillating--because he now aspired and now despaired.

He blew hot and cold in regard to the Senate, because at times he would feel it to be what it was--composed, for the most part, of men who were time-serving and corrupt, willing to sell themselves for a price to any buyer; and then, again, at times he would think of the Senate as endowed with all those privileges which he names, and would dream that under his influence it would become what it should be--such a Senate as he believed it to have been in its old palmy days.

His praise of the Senate, his description of what it should be and might be, I have given.
To the other side of the picture we shall come soon, when I shall have to show how, at the trial of Verres, he declared before the judges themselves how terrible had been the corruption of the judgment-seat in Rome since, by Sulla's enactment, it had been occupied only by the Senators.

One passage I will give now, in order that the reader may see by the juxtaposition of the words that he could denounce the Senate as loudly as he would vaunt its privileges.

In the column on the left hand in the note I quote the words with which, in the first pleading against Verres, he declared "that every base and iniquitous thing done on the judgment-seat during the ten years since the power of judging had been transferred to the Senate should be not only denounced by him, but also proved;" and in that on the right I will repeat the noble phrases which he afterward used in the speech for Cluentius when he chose to speak well of the order.[93] It was on the Senate that they who wished well for Rome must depend--on the Senate, chosen, refreshed, and replenished from among the people; on a body which should be at the same time august and popular--as far removed on the one side from the tyranny of individuals as on the other from the violence of the mob; but on a Senate freed from its corruption and dirt, on a body of noble Romans, fitted by their individual character and high rank to rule and to control their fellow-citizens.
This was Cicero's idea, and this the state of things which he endeavored to achieve.