ought to be dear. He is the instructer of every profession; the friend of every age. Make him the intimate of your youth, and you will find him the faithful and incorruptible companion of your whole life. In every variety of this mutable scene, you will find him a pleasing and instructive associate. His numerous and inveterate enemies, while he lived, solaced the consciousness of their own inferiority, by sneering at his vanity, and deriding his excessive love of glory. Yes, he had that last infirmity of noble minds! Yes, glory was the idol of his worship. His estimation of mankind over-rated the value of their applause. His estimation of himself is not liable to the same censure. His most exulting moments of self-complacency never transcended, never equalled his real worth. He had none of that affected humility, none of that disqualifying hypocrisy, which makes virtue consist in concealment, and indulges unbounded vanity at the heart, on the single condition of imposing silence upon the lips. As he thought of himself, so he spake, and without hesitation claimed the approbation of the world for talents and virtues, which he would have celebrated with ten-fold magnificence of panegyric in others. To his cotempo

raries let us admit, that the sense of his immeasurable superiority, was of itself sufficiently burdensome, without the aggravation of hearing his encomium from himself. But to the modern detractors of his fame it may be justly replied, that his failings leaned to virtue's side; that his heaviest vices might put to the blush their choicest virtues. Of his own age and nation he was unquestionably the brightest ornament.

But he

is the philosopher, the orator, the moralist of all

time, and of every region,

A modern poet has

beautifully said, that it is

"Praise enough

"To fill the ambition of a common man,

"That Chatham's language was his mother tongue,
"And Wolfe's great name compatriot with his own.”

But in contemplating a character, like this, we may joy in a more enlarged and juster application of the same sentiment. Let us make this the standard of moral and intellectual worth, for all human kind; and in the reply to all the severities of satire, and all the bitterness of misanthropy, repeat with conscious exultation, "we are of the same species of beings, as Cicero."

LECTURE VI.

INSTITUTES AND CHARACTER OF QUINCTILIAN.

IN a former lecture, you may remember, that I noticed a remarkable difference between the history of rhetoric in Greece and at Rome; and observed, that in the former eloquence appeared to have been the twin-sister to history, while in the latter she appears to have been the child of the republic's old age, at first discarded, long banished, but finally adopted, and rising to the most unbounded influence in the person of Cicero. But the duration of the period, in which rhetoric was cultivated, is equally remarkable in Greece by its length, and in Rome by its shortness. From Pittheus to Longinus, the two extremes in the chronology of the Greek rhetoricians, you per

ceive a line of more than thirteen hundred years, filled with a catalogue of writers, distinguished by their numbers, as well as by their ingenuity. At Rome we have seen the science began with Cicero. It ended with Quinctilian. These two writers lived within one hundred years of each other; and in them alone are we to seek for all, that Roman literature can furnish to elucidate the science of rhetoric. Their writings may indeed, in point of real value, contend for the prize with the more copious stores of Greece; and if a complete system were to be collected exclusively from the one or the other language, it would perhaps be difficult to say which would be most reluctantly given up, the Grecian numbers, or the Roman weight. Of the Greek rhetoricians I have given you an account, a very lame and imperfect one indeed, in a single lecture; while the writings of Cicero alone, on this theme, have already occupied two; and I now purpose to devote another to the institutes and the character of Quinctilian.

It will however be proper previously to notice a collection of declamations, under the title of controversies and deliberations, different from those, which bear the name of Quinctilian, and

published as the compilation of Seneca. Not of Seneca, the philosopher, the preceptor, the accomplice, and the victim of Nero; but another Seneca, generally supposed to be his father, and a native of Cordova in Spain. This collection was not of his own composition; but collected from upwards of one hundred writers, and accompanied by the critical remarks of the editor.

The practice of declamation among the ancients was deemed of so much importance, it was so different from that exercise, bearing the same name, to which you are accustomed, it was at one period so useful in promoting the improvement, and at another so pernicious in hastening the corruption of eloquence, that it will be proper to give you a short historical account of its rise, progress, and perversion.

There has been some controversy, by whom it was first introduced; nor is it of much importance to ascertain whether its inventor were Gorgias, the celebrated sophist, or Eschines, who, after his banishment from Athens, opened a school of oratory in the island of Rhodes, or Demetrius Phalereus, the last of the Attic orators. It is more generally agreed to have been introduced at Rome by Plotius, the first teacher of rhetoric in