Institutio Oratoria

Still let me congratulate these gentlemen on attaining eloquence without industry, method or study. As for myself I have long since retired from the task of teaching in the schools and of speaking in the courts, thinking it the most honourable conclusion to retire while my services were still in request, and all I ask is to be allowed to console my leisure by making such researches and composing such instructions as will, I hope, prove useful to young men of ability, and are, at any rate, a pleasure to myself.

Let no one however demand from me a rigid code of rules such as most authors of textbooks have laid down, or ask me to impose on students of rhetoric a system of laws immutable as fate, a system in which injunctions as to the exordium and its nature lead the way; then come the statement of facts and the laws to be observed in this connexion: next the proposition or, as some prefer, the digression, followed by prescriptions as to the order in which the various questions should be discussed, with all the other rules, which some speakers follow as though they had no

If the whole of rhetoric could be thus embodied in one compact code, it would be an easy task of little compass: but most rules are liable to be altered by the nature of the case, circumstances of time and place, and by hard necessity itself. Consequently the all-important gift for an orator is a wise adaptability since he is called upon to meet the most varied emergencies.