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"Are our rhetoricians tormented by a new tribe of
Furies when they cry: 'These scars I earned in the struggle for popular rights; I
sacrificed this eye for you: where is a guiding hand to lead me to my children? My
knees are hamstrung, and cannot support my body'? Though indeed even these speeches
might be endured if they smoothed the path of aspirants to oratory. But as it is,
the sole result of this bombastic matter and these loud empty phrases is that a
pupil who steps into a court thinks that he has been carried into another world. I
believe that college makes complete fools of our young men, because they see and
hear nothing of ordinary life there. It is pirates standing in chainson the beach,
tyrants pen in hand ordering sons to cut off their fathers' heads, oracles in time
of pestilence demanding the blood of three virgins or more, honey-balls of phrases,
every word and act besprinkled with poppy-seed and sesame.
Petronius Arbiter. Petronius. Michael Heseltine. London. William Heinemann. 1913.
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