One necessary part of the education of the orator was a course of wide and careful reading in the best literature; and it is in this special connection that Quintilian devotes part of his elaborate discussion on style to a brief critical summary of the literature of Greece and that of his own country. The frequent citations which have already been made from this part of the work may indicate the very great ability with which it is executed. Though his special purpose as a professor of rhetoric is always kept in view, his criticism passes beyond this formal limit. He expresses, no doubt, what was the general opinion of the educated world of his own time; but the form of his criticism is so careful and so choice, that many of his brief phrases have remained the final word on the authors, both in prose and verse, whom he mentions in his rapid survey. His catalogue is far from being, as it has been disparagingly called, a mere "list of the best hundred books." It is the deliberate judgment of the best Roman scholarship, in an age of wide reading and great learning, upon the masterpieces of their own literature. His own preference for certain periods and certain manners is well marked. But he never forgets that the object of criticism is to disengage excellences rather than to censure faults: even his pronounced aversion from the style of Seneca and the authors of the Neronian age does not prevent him from seeing their merits, and giving these ungrudging praise. It is, indeed, in Quintilian that the reaction from the early imperial manner comes to its climax. Statius had, to a certain degree, gone back to Virgil; Quintilian goes back to Cicero without hesitation or reserve. He is the first of the Ciceronians; Lactantius in the fourth century, John of Salisbury in the twelfth, Petrarch in the fourteenth, Erasmus in the sixteenth, all in a way continue the tradition which he founded; nor is it surprising that the discovery of a complete manuscript of the _Institutio Oratoria_, early in the fifteenth century was hailed by scholars as one of the most important events of the Renaissance. He is not, however, a mere imitator of his master's style; indeed, his style is, in some features and for some purposes, a better one than his master's. It is as clear and fluent, and not so verbose. He cannot rise to the great heights of Cicero; but for ordinary use it would be difficult to name a manner that combines so well the Ciceronian dignity with the rich colour and high finish added to Latin prose by the writers of the earlier empire.