[26]
But
nowadays our rhetoricians regard Cicero as lacking
both polish and learning; we are far superior, for
we look upon everything that is dictated by nature
as beneath our notice, and seek not for the true
ornaments of speech, but for meretricious finery, as
though there were any real virtue in words save in
their power to represent facts. And if we have to
spend all our life in the laborious effort to discover
words which will at once be brilliant, appropriate
and lucid, and to arrange them with exact precision,
we lose all the fruit of our studies.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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