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actually acquired?"--"But still we wish to resemble the Attic Speakers."--"Do so, by all means. But were not those, then, true Attic Speakers, we have just been mentioning?"--"_Nobody denies it; and these are the men we imitate._"--"But how? when they are so very different, not only from each other, but from all the rest of their contemporaries?"--"_True; but Thucydides is our leading pattern_."--"This too I can allow, if you design to compose histories, instead of pleading causes. For Thucydides was both an exact, and a stately historian: but he never intended to write models for conducting a judicial process. I will even go so far as to add, that I have often commended the speeches which he has inserted into his history in great numbers; though I must frankly own, that I neither could imitate them, if I would, nor indeed would, if I could; like a man who would neither choose his wine so new as to have been turned off in the preceding vintage, nor so excessively old as to date its age from the consulship of Opimius or Anicius."--"The latter, you'll say, _bears the highest price_." "Very probable; but when it has too much age, it has lost that delicious flavour which pleases the palate, and, in my opinion, is scarcely tolerable."--"_Would you choose, then, when you have a mind to regale yourself, to apply to a fresh, unripened cask?_" "By no means; but still there is a certain age, when good wine arrives at its utmost perfection. In the same manner, I would recommend neither a raw, unmellowed style, which, (if I may so express myself) has been newly drawn off from the vat; nor the rough, and antiquated language of the grave and manly Thucydides. For even he, if he had lived a few years later, would have acquired a much softer and mellower turn of expression."--"_Let us, then, imitate Demosthenes_."--"Good Gods! to what else do I direct all my endeavours, and my wishes! But it is, perhaps, my misfortune not to succeed. These Atticisers, howev

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