of having rivalled Demosthenes in the _Second Philippic_, or confuted
atheism in the _De Natura Deorum_. It is that he created a language which
remained for sixteen centuries that of the civilised world, and used that
language to create a style which nineteen centuries have not replaced,
and in some respects have scarcely altered. He stands in prose, like
Virgil in poetry, as the bridge between the ancient and modern world.
Before his time, Latin prose was, from a wide point of view, but one
among many local ancient dialects. As it left his hands, it had become a
universal language, one which had definitely superseded all others, Greek
included, as the type of civilised expression.

Thus the apparently obsolete criticism which ranked Cicero together with
Plato and Demosthenes, if not above them, was based on real facts, though
it may be now apparent that it gave them a wrong interpretation. Even
Hellenists may admit with but slight reluctance that the prose of the
great Attic writers is, like the sculpture of their contemporary artists,
a thing remote from modern life, requiring much training and study for
its appreciation, and confined at the best to a limited circle. But
Ciceronian prose is practically the prose of the human race; not only of
the Roman empire of the first and second centuries, but of Lactantius and
Augustine, of the mediaeval Church, of the earlier and later Renaissance,
and even now, when the Renaissance is a piece of past history, of the
modern world to which the Renaissance was the prelude.

The life of Cicero as a man of letters may be divided into four periods,
which, though not of course wholly distinct from one another, may be
conveniently treated as separate for the purpose of criticism. The first
is that of his immature early writings--poems, treatises on rhetoric, and
forensic speeches--covering the period from his boyhood in the Civil
wars, to the first consulship of Pompeius and Crassus, in 70 B.C. The