A mind equally powerful and supple, he lent himself equally to all--as fitted for action as for thought, he passed from one to the other with facility, according to the phases of his destiny.

There was in him the flexibility of the Greek mind in the stirring periods of the democracy in Athens.
His deep study early directed his mind to history, that poem of men of action.

Plutarch nourished him with his manly diet.

He moulded on the antique figures drawn from life by the historian the ideal of his own life, only all the parts of every great man suited him alike: he assumed them by turns, realised them in his reveries, as suited to reproduce In him the voluptuary as the sage, the malcontent as the patriot; Aristippus as Themistocles; Scipio as Coriolanus.

He mingled with his studies the exercises of a military life, formed his body to fatigue, at the same time that he fashioned his mind to lofty ideas; equally skilled in handling a sword and daring in subduing a horse.
Demosthenes, by patience, formed a sonorous voice from a stammering tongue.