It may not be that the readers of these orations will always sympathize with the orator in the matter which he has in hand--though his power over words is so great as to carry the reader with him very generally, even at this distance of time--but the neatness with which the weapon is used, the effectiveness of the thrust for the purpose intended, the certainty with which the nail is hit on the head--never with an expenditure of unnecessary force, but always with the exact strength wanted for the purpose--these are the characteristics of Cicero's speeches which carry the reader on with a delight which he will want to share with others, as a man when he has heard a good story instantly wishes to tell it again.

And with Cicero we are charmed by the modernness, by the tone of to-day, which his language takes.

The rapid way in which he runs from scorn to pity, from pity to anger, from anger to public zeal, and then instantly to irony and ridicule, implies a lightness of touch which, not unreasonably, surprises us as having endured for so many hundred years.

That poetry should remain to us, even lines so vapid as some of those in which Ovid sung of love, seems to be more natural, because verses, though they be light, must have been labored.

But these words spoken by Cicero seem almost to ring in our ears as having come to us direct from a man's lips.