“Yet even this might pass for tolerable, did it put young beginners in the least way to well-speaking.  Whereas now, what with the inordinate swelling of matter, and the empty ratling of words, they only gain this, That when they come to appear in publick, they think themselves in another world.  And therefore I look upon the young fry of collegiates as likely to make the most helpful blockheads, because they neither hear nor see any thing that is in use among men:  But a company of pirates with their chains on the shoar; tyrants issuing proclamations to make children kill their fathers; the answers of oracles in a plague-time, that three or more virgins be sacrific’d to appease the gods; dainty fine honey-pellets of words, and everything so said and done, as if it were all spice and garnish.

“Those that are thus bred can no more understand, than those that live in a kitchin not stink of the grease.  Give me, with your favour, leave to say, ’twas you first lost the good grace of speaking; for with light idle gingles of words to make sport ye have brought it to this, That the substance of oratory is become effeminate and sunk.

“Young men were not kept to this way of declaiming when Sophocles and Euripides influenc’d the age.  Nor yet had any blind alley-professor foil’d their inclinations, when Pindar and the Nine Lyricks durst not attempt Homer’s Numbers:  And that I may not bring my authority from poets, ’tis certain, neither Plato nor Demosthenes ever made it their practice:  A stile one would value, and as I may call it, a chast oration, is not splatchy nor swoll’n, but rises with a natural beauty.

“This windy and irregular way of babbling came lately out of Asia into Athens; and having, like some ill planet, blasted the aspiring genius of their youth, at once corrupted and put a period to all true eloquence.

“After this, who came up to the height of Thucydides?  Who reach’d the fame of Hyperedes?  Nay, there was hardly a verse of a right strain:  But all, as of the same batch, di’d with their author.  Painting also made no better an end, after the boldness of the Egyptians ventur’d to bring so great an art into a narrower compass.”

At this and the like rate my self once declaim’d, when one Agamemnon made up to us, and looking sharply on him, whom the mob with such diligence observ’d, he would not suffer me to declaim longer in the portico, than he had sweated in the school; “But, young man,” said he, “because your discourse is beyond the common apprehension, and, which is not often seen, that you are a lover of understanding, I won’t deceive you:  The masters of these schools are not to blame, who think it necessary to be mad with mad men:  For unless they teach what their scholars approve, they might, as Cicero says, keep school to themselves:  like flattering smell-feasts, who when they come to great men’s tables study nothing more than what they think may be most agreeable to the company (as well knowing they shall never obtain what they would, unless they first spread a net for their bars) so a master of eloquence, unless fisherman like, he bait his hook with what he knows the fish will bite at, may wait long enough on the rock without hopes of catching any thing.