The same promotive guidance appears in the assigning of outlines (_materiæ_), less and less ample as the pupils advance, for written composition (II. vi). This writing was generally for practise, not for casting a particular speech in form to be memorized. Sometimes, says Quintilian, the boys may recite what they have written out; but generally learning by heart is better spent on the orators and historians than on their own work (vii). The _declamatio_ recommended by Quintilian is speaking from outline on hypothetical cases. The more elementary assignments, for deliberative speeches, were called _suasoriæ_; the more advanced, for forensic speeches, _controversiæ_. Both he treats only as school exercises. Within these limits he recommends _declamatio_ as an important pedagogical discovery. “So soon as [the youth] is well taught and sufficiently exercised in these first tasks, themselves not small, but as it were members and parts of greater ones, let the time demand the essaying of deliberative speaking and forensic on assigned outlines. Before I go into the method of these, I must tell briefly what _declamatio_ has as its idea, which is at once the most recent discovery and far the most useful. For it at once embraces almost all the exercises just discussed and offers the nearest likeness to actuality. Therefore it has become so popular as to be in the opinion of many sufficient of itself to develop eloquence. Nor can there be found any mastery in consecutive discourse which is not related to this exercise in speaking. True, the actual practise has so declined by the fault of teachers that among the chief causes corrupting eloquence have been the license and ignorance of _declamatores_; but we may use well what is essentially good. “Let the outlines of the fictitious cases assigned be therefore as like as possible to actuality; and let the _declamatio_, so far as possible, imitate those pleas for which it was invented to prepare. Wizards, pestilence, oracles, stepmothers more cruel than those of tragedy, and other topics even more imaginary, we seek in vain among real law cases. What, then? Are we never to permit a young man to elaborate themes outside of statistics, even poetical ones, such indeed as I myself have mentioned, that he may have room, take some pleasure in the assignment, and enter as it were into the body [of the party he defends]? That used to be all very well; but at least let such [exercises] be grand and swelling without being silly and to critical eyes ridiculous.” II. x. 1-6.