and closely followed and abridged in their rhetorical works by
Cassiodorus, Julius Victor, and Isidore of Seville. From the eighth
century until Poggio discovered the complete manuscript at St. Gall in
1416, the world knew only mutilated fragments of the text. On the basis
of an incomplete manuscript Etienne de Rouen prepared in the twelfth
century an abridgment of Quintilian, and soon after an anonymous
enthusiast made a selection of the _Flores Quintilianei_.[171] Thus, while
the rhetorical works of Aristotle were practically unknown, and the
Ciceronian tradition rested on the _De inventione_ and the _Ad Herennium_,
the rhetorical ideas of Quintilian, as preserved in abridgments and in the
treatises of Cassiodorus and Isidore, passed current throughout the middle
ages. When the first edition was published by Campano in 1470, the world
of scholars welcomed a familiar friend.

Other classical critical treatises filtered into England even more slowly.
The _De compositione verborum_ of Dionysius of Halicarnassus received its
first printing at the hands of Aldus in 1508 and was edited again by
Estienne in 1546, and by Sturm in 1550. Yet had Ascham not been a friend
of Sturm's, it might not have been heard of in England as early as 1570,
when the _Scholemaster_ was published. Ascham says it is worthy of study,
but shows no great familiarity with the text.[172]

The _De sublimitate_ of pseudo-Longinus has a similar history in England.
Published by Robortelli in Basel in 1554, it was reissued three times,
once with a Latin translation, before Langhorne edited it (1636) at
Oxford. No Elizabethan writer alludes to it or seems to have been aware of
its existence until Thomas Farnaby cites it as an authority for his _Index
Rhetoricus_ (1633). The advance of classical scholarship in England is
indeed no better illustrated than by a comparison of Farnaby's cited
sources with those of Thomas Wilson (1553). Wilson knew and used Cicero,