We have now to deal with the moral essays of this almost inexhaustible contributor to the world's literature, and we shall then have named perhaps a quarter of all that he wrote. I have seen somewhere a calculation that only a tenth of his works remain to us, dug out, as it were, from the buried ruins of literature by the care of sedulous¹ and eager scholars. I make a more modest estimate of his powers. Judging from what we know to have been lost, and from the absence of any effort to keep the greater portion of his letters, I think that I do not exaggerate his writing. Who can say but that as time goes on some future Petrarch or some future Mai may discover writings hitherto unknown, concealed² in convent boxes, or more mysteriously hidden beneath the labors³ of Middle-Age monks⁵? It was but in 1822 that the De Republica was brought to light—so much of it at least as we still possess; and for more than thirty years afterward⁶ Cardinal⁷ Mai continued to reproduce, from time to time, collections of Greek and Latin writings hitherto unheard of by classical readers. Let us hope, however, that the zeal⁸ of the learned may stop short of that displayed by Simon Du Bos, or we may have whole treatises⁹ of Cicero of which he himself was guiltless.306

305I can hardly content myself with classifying the De Republica and the De Legibus under the same name with these essays of Cicero, which are undoubtedly¹¹ moral in their nature. But it may pass, perhaps, without that distinct contradiction which had to be made as to the enveloping¹² the De Officiis in the

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