auties of
discourse, and had his reasons for it, having intended his eloquence for
schools and not for contentions at the bar. His invention was easy, he
was very fond of graces and embellishments, and so nice was he in his
composition that his extreme care is not without reprehension.

_Plato_

Among philosophers, by whom Cicero confesses he has been furnished with
many resourceful aids to eloquence, who doubts that Plato is the chief,
whether we consider the acuteness of his dissertations, or his divine
Homerical faculty of elocution? He soars high above prose, and even
common poetry, which is poetry only because comprised in a certain
number of feet; and he seems to me not so much endowed with the wit of
a man, as inspired by a sort of Delphic oracle.

_Xenophon_

What shall I say of Xenophon's unaffected agreeableness, so unattainable
by any imitation that the Graces themselves seem to have composed his
language? The testimony of the ancient comedy concerning Pericles, is
very justly applicable to him, "That the Goddess of Persuasion had
seated herself on his lips."

_Aristotle and Theophrastus_

And what shall I say of the elegance of the other disciples of Socrates?
What of Aristotle? I am at a loss to know what most to admire in him,
his vast and profound erudition, or the great number of his writings, or
his pleasing style and manner, or the inventions and penetration of his
wit, or the variety of his works. And as to Theophrastus, his elocution
has something so noble and so divine that it may be said that from these
qualities came his name.

_Vergil_

In regard to our Roman authors, we can not more happily begin than with
Vergil, who of all their poets and ours in the epic style, is without
any doubt the one who comes nearest to Homer. Tho obliged to give way to
Homer's heavenly and immortal genius, yet in Vergil are to be found a
greater exactness and care, it being incumbent on him to take more
pains; so that what we lose on the side of eminence of qualities, we
perhaps gain on that of justness and equability.

_Cicero_

I proceed to our orators, who likewise may put Roman eloquence upon a
par with the Grecian. Cicero I would strenuously oppose against any of
them, tho conscious of the quarrel I should bring upon myself by
comparing him with Demosthenes in a time so critical as this; especially
as my subject does not oblige me to it, neither is it of any
consequence, when it is my real