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CATO THE CENSOR.

(From a gem in the Florentine Museum.)

The events of their early life—those events which always bear most clearly the impress of the mind, because actuated by choice, and not by present or future consequences—were almost identical. They both entered the army in youth, and both quitted it for the Senate. Here each displayed those powers of eloquence which raised them to the highest eminence, and will transmit their names to the latest posterity. Its peculiar feature was that energetic, powerful, and determined vehemence of language, which takes the mind prisoner, and carries the judgment with it by storm. It was irresistible. Before it all minds of less power, though of greater intellect and activity, recoiled. The orations of Cato are unhappily lost. But Cicero, a master of eloquence, and well enabled to compare them with similar compositions, passes upon them the highest eulogiums. The eloquence of Cato has been compared, for its force and energy, to the eloquence of that Demosthenes before whom Philip of Macedon quailed, and whose tremendous orations have given the name of Philippics to all sarcastic and vehement invectives. Of Chatham’s eloquence, it has been said by Wilkes: “Nothing could withstand the force of that contagion. The fluent Murray has faltered, and even Fox shrunk back appalled from an adversary ‘fraught with fire unquenchable,’ if I may borrow the expression of our great Milton. He had not the correctness of language so striking in the great Roman orator; but he had the verba ardentia, the bold, glowing words.”