Owing to this large conception of the qualities of the orator, Quintilian’s great work became a general and very important treatise on education. Its arrangement is as follows: the first book treats of the elements of education and contains many interesting observations upon family life; the fundamental principles of rhetoric are treated in the second book, which carries on the discussion of the purposes and methods of education; the next five books (III-VII) deal exhaustively with the matter of oratory under the main heads of _invention_ and _disposition_ or arrangement, and are for the most part strictly technical; four books (VIII-XI) treat of expression and all that is included in the word _style_ with a discussion of memorizing and delivery; and the last book (XII), now that the theory of oratory is expounded, reverts to the orator himself, and discusses the moral qualities and the continuous self-discipline which alone can make the orator great. The technical part of the _Institutio Oratoria_, is now, since the study of formal rhetoric is no longer an important part of a liberal education, of little interest except to those who make a special study of Roman style and educational theories. Yet even in these books are many wise utterances of permanent value, such as “the price of a laugh is too high when it is purchased at the expense of virtue”;[102] or, “a joke at the expense of the wretched is inhuman”;[103] or, “it is the spirit and the force of mind that make men eloquent.”[104] Such remarks, admirably expressed and inserted in fitting places, make the more technical books of Quintilian’s work even now well worth reading. But the chief interest for the modern reader lies in those parts of the work which have less to do with the special training of the orator, and are more general in their scope—the discussion of elementary education in the first book, the treatise on the larger and broader education of mature life in the last book, and the brief critical survey of Greek and Latin literature in the first chapter of the tenth book.