Evening drill, which was called _declension_, was packed with so much grammar that if one gave a whole year to it he would have at his command, if he were not unusually dull, a method of speaking and writing, and he could not be ignorant of expressions which are in common use.... For those of the boys for whom preliminary exercises in imitating prose or poetry were prescribed, he announced the poets or orators and bade them imitate their example, pointing out the way they joined their words and the elegance of their perorations. But if any one to make his own work brilliant had borrowed the cloak of another he detected the theft and convicted him, though he did not very often inflict a punishment; but he directed the culprit thus convicted, if the poorness of his work had so merited, to condescend with modest favor to express the exact meaning of the author; and he made the one who imitated his predecessors worthy of imitation by his successors. The following matters, too, he taught among the first rudiments and fixed them in their minds:--the value of order; what is praiseworthy in embellishment and in [choice of] words; where there is tenuity and, as it were, emaciation of speech; where, a pleasing abundance; where, excess; and where, a due limit in all things.... And since in the entire preliminary training of those who are to be taught there is nothing more useful than to grow accustomed to that which must needs be done with skill, they repeatedly wrote prose and poetry every day, and trained themselves by mutual comparisons,--a training than which nothing is more effective for eloquence, nothing more expeditious for learning; and it confers the greatest benefit upon life, at least, if affection [rather than envy] rules these comparisons, if humility is not lost in literary proficiency.[13] John's stay at Chartres (1138-1141) made him a permanent advocate of liberal education; but to no avail; the influence of Paris and the rising tide of Aristotelianism gained the day. As a champion of the newly-recovered works of Aristotle (see p. 42) he was more in accord with the tendencies of his time. The concluding section of the account narrates John's return to Paris, his further studies there (1141-1148), and his visit to his old school on the "Mount":