“I believe that the reason why schoolboys and students become such fools is, that they never see or hear of anything to which we are accustomed in the actual world. They are occupied by pirates standing on the beach with chains in their hands, by tyrants ordaining that sons shall cut their fathers’ heads off, by oracles against a pestilence to the effect that three or more virgins are to be sacrificed, by little bundles of words smeared with honey, and everything, as it were, powdered with poppy-seed and sesamum. For people bred in this fashion sense is as impossible as a pleasant odour for those who live in the kitchen.[305] If you will excuse my saying so, you rhetoricians were the first to ruin literature. By exciting ridicule of [_or_ playing tricks with] your light and empty phrases,[306] you weakened and prostrated the whole body of oratory. Youth had not yet been enslaved to declamations when Sophocles and Euripides devised the words in which they were to speak. The private schoolmaster[307] had not spoilt good wits when Pindar and the Nine Lyrists feared to sing in Homeric verse. And not to allege poets only, I certainly find it nowhere said that Plato and Demosthenes betook themselves to this kind of eloquence. Oratory full grown, and, if I may say so, in her maidenhood, is not spotted and swelling [like a toad], but shoots up in natural beauty. Footnote 305: Or “good taste is as impossible as good smell to those,” &c. I have not hit on any satisfactory English equivalents for _sapere_ (with its double sense) and _bene olere_. What is meant, of course, is that the power of distinguishing is lost in the vicious atmosphere. Footnote 306: _Ludibria quædam excitando._ Footnote 307: _Umbraticus doctor_, which Ben Jonson Englishes directly as “umbratical doctors” in the _Discoveries_, and De Quincey rather hardily converts to a compliment in his _Essay on Rhetoric_. “Of late this windy and extravagant loquacity has shifted from Asia to Athens, and has breathed upon the aspiring minds of youth like a pestilential star, and forthwith true eloquence, its rule corrupted, has been arrested, and put to silence. Tell me, who has since equalled the fame of Thucydides, of Hyperides? Not so much as a lyric of wholesome complexion has appeared, and everything, as if poisoned with the same food, has been unable to last to a natural grey old age. Even painting has made no better end, since the audacity of the Egyptians has cut so great an art down to shorthand.” The rhetorician Agamemnon defends scholastic procedure by the old plan of throwing the blame on parents and the like; but the story quickly turns to one of its more than “picaresque” episodes, and the subject drops.