at school and college.  But there were two great defects in it.  First, as Professor Wilkins points out, the subjects of declamation were too often out of all relation to real life, e.g. taken from the Greek mythology; or if less barren than usual, were far more commonplace and flat than those of our debating societies.  To harangue on the question whether the life of a lawyer or a soldier is the best, is hardly so inspiring as to debate a question of the day about Ireland or India, which educates in living fact as well as in the rules of the orator’s art.  Secondly, the whole aim and object of this “finishing” portion of a boy’s education was a false one.  Even the excellent Quintilian, the best of all Roman teachers, believed that the statesman (civilis vir) and the orator are identical:  that the statesman must be vir bonus because the vir bonus makes the best orator; that he should be sapiens for the same reason.[302] And the object of oratory is “id agere, ut iudici quae proposita fuerint, vera et honesta videantur":[303] i.e. the object is not truth, but persuasion.  We might get an idea of how such a training would fail in forming character, if we could imagine all our liberal education subordinated to the practice of journalism.  But fortunately for us, in this scientific age, words and the use of words no longer serve as the basis of education or as the chief nurture of young life.  We need to see facts, to understand causes, to distinguish objective truth from truth reflected in books.  But the perfect education must be a skilful mingling of the two methods; and it may be as well to take care that we do not lose contact with the best thoughts of the best men, because they are contained in the literature we show some signs of neglecting.  We may say of science what Cicero said of rhetoric, that it cannot do without sapientia.

Of schools of philosophy I have already said something in the last chapter, and as the study of philosophy was hardly a part of the regular curriculum of education properly so called, I shall pass it over here.  The philosopher was usually to be found in wealthy houses, and if he were a wholesome person, and not a Philodemus, he might assuredly exercise a good influence on a young man.  Or a youth might go to Athens or Rhodes or to some other Greek city, to attend the lectures of some famous professor.  Cicero heard Phaedrus the Epicurean at Rome and then Philo the Academician, who had a lasting influence on his pupil, and then, at the age of twenty-seven, went to Greece for two years, studying at Athens, Rhodes, and elsewhere.  Caesar also went to Rhodes, and he and Cicero both attended the lectures of Molo in rhetoric, in which study, as well as in philosophy, lectures were to be heard in all the great Greek cities.[304] Cicero sent his own son to “the University in Athens” at the age of twenty, giving him an ample allowance and doubtless much good advice.  The young man soon outran his allowance and got into debt; the good advice he seems to have failed to utilise, and in fact gave his father considerable anxiety.