Such being the
case, let me hear no more of conjectures and opinions, for you have now my
warrant for the fact, whose information is past doubting. Therefore, be
satisfied; otherwise, I will put every man of you on board some crazy old
fleet, and whistle you down the tide--no matter under what winds, no
matter towards what shore." Finally, we might seek for the
_characteristic_ anecdotes of Caesar in his unexampled liberalities
and contempt of money. [Footnote: Middleton's Life of Cicero, which still
continues to be the most readable digest of these affairs, is feeble and
contradictory. He discovers that Caesar was no general! And the single
merit which his work was supposed to possess, viz. the better and more
critical arrangement of Cicero's Letters, in respect to their chronology,
has of late years been detected as a robbery from the celebrated
Bellenden, of James the First's time.]
Upon this last topic it is the just remark of Casaubon, that some
instances of Caesar's munificence have been thought apocryphal, or to rest
upon false readings, simply from ignorance of the heroic scale upon which
the Roman splendors of that age proceeded.
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