Page:Cicero And The Fall Of The Roman Republic.djvu/225

61 B.C.] overweening, repellent; their power of judgment and of action is impaired; they are obstinate because they are weak; they would rather perish than allow themselves to be in the wrong, and they delight in rejecting the counsels of common-sense merely to show their own greatness and independence. Sometimes, on the other hand, vanity is a mere superficial weakness, the accompaniment of a light heart, a quick, sensitive temperament, an unsuspicious loquacity, and an innocent love of display. Carlyle has hit off the difference very happily in the contrast which he draws between Boswell and his father—"Old Auchinleck had, if not the gay tail-spreading peacock vanity of his son, no little of the slow-stalking contentious hissing vanity of the gander, a still more fatal species."

Now Cicero's vanity is essentially of the innocuous and peacock-like kind. There is no pompous reticence about him. If he happens to be pleased with himself he blurts out his satisfaction with an almost childlike simplicity; if the laugh turns against him, he is not wounded or distressed, and on occasion he can make fun of himself with perfect grace and good humour. Nothing can be happier than the story, as told by Cicero, of his own expectations of fame from his Sicilian quæstorship, and how he was disabused of them. This has been quoted in its place (above, p. 23). It is amusing to observe that, when Cicero finds himself, four-and-twenty years later, again charged with the administration of a province, he has just the same admiration for the integrity of his own conduct, and expresses that admiration with the