Before his death Cicero saw the fate of his favorite literary creed that prose should be a work of art. It is well to remember that as he had adopted this creed from his teachers so had his literary opponents adopted from their teachers at least the verbal expression of their own creed, i.e., that it was the business of the speaker to do the task before him simply and honestly without resorting to artifice. However, I do not believe that the literary contest that cost Cicero so much distress in his last days was essentially one of theory; it was rather one that grew out of the milieu in which he lived. Long before Caesar’s day, Cato had expressed his natural aversion to the artifices of Crates and Carneadas when he said with his characteristic impatience: “Get hold of your theme and the words will take care of themselves.” Cicero in his youth had found the same antithesis expressed in Antonius and Crassus. And he lived to see men like Caesar, Brutus, and Calvus win the young men away from his own ideals to those of the matter-of-fact style. The antithesis lies deep in human nature and crops up in the revolt that each generation feels toward its predecessor. It is hardly sound to attribute the dominance of such elementary creeds to schoolroom precepts. The preceptor is usually a man who notes the requirements of his day and tries to prepare his pupils for its needs. He follows more often than he leads, as any one may observe who will examine any twenty standard books on composition produced by teachers during the last fifty years in America. They follow usage, they do not beget it.