Catiline had struggled for the Consulship, and had failed.

Again there would be no province, no plunder, no power.

This interference, as it must have seemed to him, with his peculiar privileges, had all come from Cicero.

Cicero was the busybody who was attempting to stop the order of things which had, to his thinking, been specially ordained by all the gods for the sustenance of one so well born, and at the same time so poor, as himself.

There was a vulgar meddling about it--all coming from the violent virtue of a Consul whose father had been a nobody at Arpinum--which was well calculated to drive Catiline into madness.