sought out the tutor who could help him attain what he demanded. This procedure seems to me characteristic of the great Roman stylists. Cicero and Caesar, Sallust and Livy, Seneca and Tacitus, betray themselves in their sentence structure. The secret of their expression will never be disclosed by a search for their models nor in the rhetorical rules then current. The aim of this chapter is limited. It cannot even attempt the important task of illustrating from a study of Cicero the valid rule that style is the man. It will attempt only to sketch the growth of Latin prose up to Cicero’s day in order to suggest how that prose became adequate to clothe the varied expression of so versatile a genius. Roman, like English, prose developed its sonority, dignity, and rhythm in persuasive speech. As in England during the religious reformation, pulpit oratory molded speech, so in Rome, during the period of political reformation from Cato to Cicero, forensic contests in the senate house and at the tribunals transformed Roman expression. This parallel may seem obvious, but one offers it with hesitation because Roman oratorical style is generally supposed to have been shaped by the study of Greek rhetoric in the schoolroom. Quite apart, however, from the fact that true art is seldom amenable to the compulsion of precept, chronology militates against this theory. Roman prose had traveled far before it resorted to any guidance from Greece. Like the English of Wycliffe, early Roman prose was formless. It merely followed the habits of unshaped spontaneous conversation. If anything was to be recorded with care, it employed the forms of art, that is, of verse. Naevius and Ennius wrote their chronicles in meter. Even Chaucer, who is so luminous in his verse narratives, becomes involved and at times almost incoherent in his few attempts to write prose, unless in fact he yields to the temptation of admitting rhythm into his sentences. But Chaucer is one of the last of the great writers to flounder thus. The Wyclifite Bible marked the beginning of a religious contest that continued for two centuries with more or less intensity, and finally with passionate vehemence. It was a contest that, to many, involved a question of life and death and to even more the problem of eternal salvation. The gravity of the theme called for the noblest possible expression, while the deep concern of all classes, even the most ignorant, required clarity and directness of utterance. The temptation of the learned to exaggerate rhetoric into Euphuism was immediately checked by the need of being intelligible to the congregation, while the tendency of plain persons toward colloquial formlessness was checked both by the deep respect for the sacred theme and by the high level of cultural taste among the clergy of the time. We need not deny the great influence of Ciceronian and Augustinian models upon these learned men, and in Lyly’s courtly group