Whether its correct title be _Institutiones Oratoriæ_, or _De Institutione Oratoria_, and whether this be better translated _Principles of Oratory_, or _Of the Education of an Orator_, are questions not very important _to us_. The sense of “Institutes” may be illustrated by the old division of academical chairs in, for instance, Medicine into “Institutes” (_i.e._, “Theory”) and “Practice.” But Quintilian includes a good deal of the practical side. All the editions of Quintilian are either antiquated by, or more or less based upon, that of Spalding and Zumpt, with Lexicon, &c., by Bonnell, Leipsic, 1798-1834. I find the little Tauchnitz print of the text (ibid., 1829) very useful. The Bohn translation, by the ill-starred J. S. Watson, though not impeccable, will serve English readers well enough. This wide range of it (which, according to different, but, in each case, defensible interpretations of its title, busies itself with the whole education of an orator, or with the whole theory and practice of oratory) naturally makes it include much which does not fall strictly within our subject. But nearly the whole of three books, the eighth, ninth, and tenth, and a large and important section of the twelfth, are devoted directly to that subject; while there are references to it almost throughout. We shall therefore, as we did in the case of Aristotle and Longinus, give a kind of running abstract of the whole, dwelling very briefly on the irrelevant, somewhat more fully on the partly relevant, fully on the rest, and returning to the consideration of special points later. In a sort of Advertisement, to and for the use of his publisher Trypho, and in a prefatory dedication to his friend Marcellus [Sidenote: _Preface._] Victorius, Quintilian gives some information about the origin and object of the work. From this we learn, among other things, that part-cause at least of its actual appearance was the fact, not unknown in more modern times, of unauthorised publication of his lectures by note-taking pupils.