The climax of the praise is his _disciplina_. _Declamatio_ teaches boys to develop an outline at length. So providing boys’ themes with pieces to weave in, they understood that for youth expression consists rather in working out what is brief than in cutting down what is extended.[33] But this is no less the achievement of the finished orator. So a great orator, if he essays an affair that is small, shows the more convincingly that his talent is large.[34] The habit of dilation is carried into poetry. Is it not sanctioned by Horace? But if any one suggests that a poem so diffuse is to be blamed for exceeding the sparseness of epigram, he exposes himself as not having read the Etruscan baths, nor the Hercules of Sorrento, nor the locks of Flavius Earinus, nor the Tibur of Vopiscus, nor anything at all from the _Silvæ_ of our Papinius; for all these ecphrases are not confined by the poet thus prejudged within the narrow bounds of distichs or quatrains. Rather as Horace, though a lyrist, teaches in his volume on the poetic art, he appropriately extends the matter he has undertaken by many, yes, and purple, patches from the common store.[35] Horace is so misapplied because _declamatio_ tends to merge poetic in rhetoric.[36] The poems of Sidonius differ from his prose in little but verse. Three of the longer ones are panegyrics; all are occasional; all show the same habits of style. The literary tags used to sum up the teaching of Probus[37] assign to poetry a kind of appropriateness which belongs to rhetoric. Sapaudus owes his literary reputation to his training in _declamatio_ under Pragmatius, who used to “break the rhetoric benches” with a peroration.[38] In short, the rhetoric and the poetic of fifth-century Gaul are seen in Sidonius to be following faithfully the sophistic tradition of _declamatio_. He knows all its recipes. From correctness conceived as archaism and elegance conceived as ceremony, through dilation by the Gorgian figures and by literary allusion, he is constant to the sophistic ideal of expert impressiveness.[39] Augustine had been the pioneer of the Christian future of rhetoric; Sidonius was a complacent reactionary of its decadent Roman past. 3. Textbooks a. GRAMMATICA AND DIALECTICA In this period were written the Latin grammars authoritative throughout the middle age, those of Donatus and Priscian.[40] The former, used generally in two parts as an introductory manual, was so current, indeed, as to become common property and to reduce its author’s name to a common noun.[41] Priscian came to be used as a second book.[42] The ancient tradition including in the scope of _grammatica_ not only meters and some of the figures of speech, but also the study of poetry through _prælectiones_,[43] is recognized in several of the preliminary definitions.