We ourselves know only too well how a thing good in itself as a means is apt to lose its value if raised into the place of an end;--how the young mind is apt to elevate cricket, football, golf, into the main object of all human activity.

So it was with rhetoric; it was the indispensable acquirement to enable a man to enjoy thoroughly the game in the Forum, and thus in education it became the staple commodity.

The actual process of acquiring it was no doubt an excellent intellectual exercise,--the learning rules of composition, the exercises in applying these rules, i.e.the writing of themes or essays (proposita, communes loci), in which the pupil had "to find and arrange his own facts,"[300] and then the declamatio, or exercise in actual speaking on a given subject, which in Cicero's day was called causa, and was later known as controversia.[301] Such practice must have brought out much talent and ingenuity, like that of our own debating societies at school and college.

But there were two great defects in it.

First, as Professor Wilkins points out, the subjects of declamation were too often out of all relation to real life, e.g.
taken from the Greek mythology; or if less barren than usual, were far more commonplace and flat than those of our debating societies.