Not only did Latin monopolize the curriculum of the sixteenth-century school, but the study was primarily philological, for grammatical structure, and only secondarily for the content of the literature, for a correct understanding of the author. As a matter of fact, the method of study was such as to make intelligent comprehension of the author’s thought next to impossible, since the humanists simply culled out phrases which might be imitated and used in the exercises of style. Raumer says of this kind of teaching: “The author was not an end, but only a means to an end—the cultivation of deified Roman eloquence in boys. And why? Precisely as the peacock was used by the jackdaw. They borrowed the author’s words and phrases, grouped them together, and learned them by heart, in order subsequently to apply them in speech or writing. Borrow is too feeble an expression; for the jackdaw designed not merely to borrow the peacock’s feathers, but to represent them as his own. The doctrine of imitation, as set forth by Sturm and the others, was, after all, a mere jackdaw theory. The pupil was taught how, by a slight alteration, to disguise phrases from Cicero, and then to use them in writing or speech, exactly as if they were his own productions, so adroitly smuggling them in that the readers or hearers might not suspect from whence they were taken. Says Sturm: ‘When the teacher gives out themes for composition, he should draw attention to those points where imitation is desirable, and show how similarity may be concealed by a superadded variation.’ Again: ‘We must, in the first place, take care that the similarity shall not be manifest. Its concealment may be accomplished in three ways—by adding, by taking away, and by alteration.’” In this mad race for Latin eloquence, the sixteenth-century humanists became more and more circumscribed in the choice of authors. Sturm, for example, placed Cicero at the head of the list, because of the faultless models of his eloquence. The Jesuits likewise held Cicero in high esteem. Said one of their writers, “Style should be drawn almost exclusively from Cicero, although the most approved of the historians need not on that account be overlooked.” Again: “The pattern we should follow in style is comprehended in the words of the rule, ‘imitate Cicero.’ As in the study of theology we follow the divine Thomas Aquinas, and in philosophy Aristotle, so in the humanities Cicero must be regarded as our peculiar and preëminent leader. For he has been crowned by the palm of superior praise by the common consent of the world. But some, misguided by a wilful and self-formed taste, have gone astray, preferring a style totally different from that of Cicero; such an erratic course is quite at variance with the genius of our institutions and hostile to the spirit of prompt obedience.”