[21]
These instructions may seem but trivialities in
view of the fact that I am professing to describe the
education of an orator. But studies, like men, have
their infancy, and as the training of the body which
is destined to grow to the fulness of strength begins
while the child is in his cradle and at his mother's
breast, so even the man who is destined to rise to
the heights of eloquence was once a squalling babe,
tried to speak in stammering accents and was
puzzled by the shapes of letters. Nor does the
fact that capacity for learning is inadequate, prove
that it is not necessary to learn anything.
Quintilian. With an English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1920.
The Annenberg CPB/Project provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.