XXIX.  In the present age, what is our practice?  The infant is committed to a Greek chambermaid, and a slave or two, chosen for the purpose, generally the worst of the whole household train; all utter strangers to every liberal notion.  In that worshipful society [a] the youth grows up, imbibing folly and vulgar error.  Throughout the house, not one servant cares what he says or does [b] in the presence of his young master:  and indeed how should it be otherwise?  The parents themselves are the first to give their children the worst examples of vice and luxury.  The stripling consequently loses all sense of shame, and soon forgets the respect he owes to others as well as to himself.  A passion for horses, players, and gladiators [c], seems to be the epidemic folly of the times.  The child receives it in his mother’s womb; he brings it with him into the world; and in a mind so possessed, what room for science, or any generous purpose?

In our houses, at our tables, sports and interludes are the topics of conversation.  Enter the places of academical lectures, and who talks of any other subject?  The preceptors themselves have caught the contagion.  Nor can this be wondered at.  To establish a strict and regular discipline, and to succeed by giving proofs of their genius, is not the plan of our modern rhetoricians.  They pay their court to the great, and, by servile adulation, increase the number of their pupils.  Need I mention the manner of conveying the first elements of school learning?  No care is taken to give the student a taste for the best authors [d]; the page of history lies neglected; the study of men and manners is no part of their system; and every branch of useful knowledge is left uncultivated.  A preceptor is called in, and education is then thought to be in a fair way.  But I shall have occasion hereafter to speak more fully of that class of men, called rhetoricians.  It will then be seen, at what period that profession first made its appearance at Rome, and what reception it met with from our ancestors.

XXX.  Before I proceed, let us advert for a moment to the plan of ancient discipline.  The unwearied diligence of the ancient orators, their habits of meditation, and their daily exercise in the whole circle of arts and sciences, are amply displayed in the books which they have transmitted to us.  The treatise of Cicero, entitled Brutus [a], is in all our hands.  In that work, after commemorating the orators of a former day, he closes the account with the particulars of his own progress in science, and the method he took in educating himself to the profession of oratory.  He studied the civil law under [b] Mucius Scaevola; he was instructed in the various systems of philosophy, by Philo [c] of the academic school, and by Diodorus the stoic; and though Rome, at that time, abounded with the best professors, he made a voyage to Greece [d], and thence to Asia, in order to enrich his mind with every branch of learning.