Quintilian, a salaried professor and practitioner of rhetoric under the Flavian emperors, has left us an exhaustive treatise upon _The Training of the Orator_, a training which begins at the cradle. The work sets forth in all their completeness the principles of oratory, but it is incidentally a discussion of education in a wider sense. The formation of “a good man skilled in speaking” involves more than the cultivation of language and the mastery of speech and delivery. It implies great mental culture, and particularly culture derived from literature. To subsequent ages Quintilian became an authoritative law-giver in the domain of rhetoric, criticism, and language. Doubtless it would have been intellectually better for the later European world to study its philosophy and culture in the Greek originals, but, these being commonly inaccessible, all gratitude is due to Cicero, Seneca, and Quintilian for supplying so excellent a substitute in Latin. Roman oratory, in the form of written speeches, is fortunately represented for us by the greatest of Roman orators. It is a trite observation that oratory can have no existence, except artificially, under a despotism. Cicero, however, lived in the last days of the republic, when speech was still free, burning questions numerous, and the art of public speaking fully developed. Accordingly in his long list of public speeches he has complete liberty to express himself with such vigour, passion, pathos or humour as he chooses. The Roman ideal still demanded from a great public character the quality of _gravitas_, a moral impressiveness; that quality was in any case congenial to Cicero; but, with that maintained, his scope was unrestricted. To the modern reader the oratorical greatness of Cicero lies in the verbal eloquence rather than in strenuous cogency of thought, or in those powerful flashes which come from Demosthenes. He is an ingenious special pleader, a tactful disposer of arguments; but, above all, he is a master of full, rich, sonorous, impressive, and overwhelming language. As compared with Demosthenes, he is at times somewhat too copious, and even too florid; he is evidently speaking to a people less critical and less true in taste; his humour is apt to be awkward; nevertheless the impression left upon the reader is that of a man who employed superlative gifts, natural and acquired, in an art of which he entertained a lofty conception. It is not too much to say that the highest eloquence of Italy, France, and England has at all times striven to be Ciceronian. Cicero was the model, consciously or unconsciously, of Burke, Pitt, Fox, or Gladstone, just as he was the model of great French preachers like Bossuet. It is perhaps one mark of his inferiority to Demosthenes that he can be thus imitated. Demosthenes himself is inimitable. In its later stages Roman oratory was too much given to hunting the phrase, its decoration became vicious with efforts of preciosity.