to enliven our jolly conversation with witty stories. Fabricius Veiento
has already spoken very cleverly on the errors committed in the name of
religion, and shown how priests, animated by an hypocritical mania for
prophecy, boldly expound mysteries which are too often such to
themselves. But) are our rhetoricians tormented by another species of
Furies when they cry, "I received these wounds while fighting for the
public liberty; I lost this eye in your defense: give me a guide who will
lead me to my children, my limbs are hamstrung and will not hold me up!"
Even these heroics could be endured if they made easier the road to
eloquence; but as it is, their sole gain from this ferment of matter and
empty discord of words is, that when they step into the Forum, they think
they have been carried into another world. And it is my conviction that
the schools are responsible for the gross foolishness of our young men,
because, in them, they see or hear nothing at all of the affairs of
every-day life, but only pirates standing in chains upon the shore,
tyrants scribbling edicts in which sons are ordered to behead their own
fathers; responses from oracles, delivered in time of pestilence,
ordering the immolation of three or more virgins; every word a honied
drop, every period sprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame.




CHAPTER THE SECOND.

Those who are brought up on such a diet can no more attain to wisdom than
a kitchen scullion can attain to a keen sense of smell or avoid stinking
of the grease. With your indulgence, I will speak out: you--teachers
--are chiefly responsible for the decay of oratory. With your well
modulated and empty tones you have so labored for rhetorical effect that