This text is part of:
[5]
some who have grown old in the
schools lose their heads when confronted by the
novelty of the law courts and wish that it were
possible to reproduce all the conditions under which
they delivered their exercises. But there sits the
judge in silence, their opponent bellows at them, no
rash utterance passes unnoticed and all assumptions
must be proved, the clock cuts short the speech that
has been laboriously pieced together at the cost of
hours of study both by day and night, and there are
certain cases which require simplicity of language and
the abandonment of the perpetual bombast of the
schools, a fact which these fluent fellows completely
fail to realise.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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.