I need not cite the poets for evidence, for I do not find that either Plato or Demosthenes was given to this kind of exercise.

A dignified and, if I may say it, a chaste, style, is neither elaborate nor loaded with ornament; it rises supreme by its own natural purity.

This windy and high-sounding bombast, a recent immigrant to Athens, from Asia, touched with its breath the aspiring minds of youth, with the effect of some pestilential planet, and as soon as the tradition of the past was broken, eloquence halted and was stricken dumb.

Since that, who has attained to the sublimity of Thucydides, who rivalled the fame of Hyperides?
Not a single poem has glowed with a healthy color, but all of them, as though nourished on the same diet, lacked the strength to live to old age.

Painting also suffered the same fate when the presumption of the Egyptians "commercialized" that incomparable art.