never worse than it is in ages which employ themselves in teaching
little else. Such teaching produces an emptiness of thought concealed
under a plethora of words. This age of countless oratorical masters was
emphatically the period of decadence and decay. There is a hollow ring
about it, a falsetto tone in its voice; a fatiguing literary grimace in
the manner of its authors. Even its writers of genius were injured and
corrupted by the prevailing mode. They can say nothing simply; they are
always in contortions. Their very indignation and bitterness of heart,
genuine as it is, assumes a theatrical form of expression.[7] They
abound in unrealities: their whole manner is defaced with would-be
cleaverness, with antitheses, epigrams, paradoxes, forced expressions,
figures and tricks of speech, straining after originality and profundity
when they are merely repeating very commonplace remarks. What else could
one expect in an age of salaried declaimers, educated in a false
atmosphere of superficial talk, for ever haranguing and perorating about
great passions which they had never felt, and great deeds which they
would have been the last to imitate? After perpetually immolating the
Tarquins and the Pisistratids in inflated grandiloquence, they would go
to lick the dust off a tyrant's shoes. How could eloquence survive when
the magnanimity and freedom which inspired it were dead, and when the
men and books which professed to teach it were filled with despicable
directions about the exact position in which the orator was to use his
hands, and as to whether it was a good thing or not for him to slap his
forehead and disarrange his hair?

[Footnote 7:
"Juvénal, élevé dans les cris de l'école
Poussa jusqu'à l'excès sa mordante hyperbole."--
BOILEAU.]