has more breadth. He has more flesh, but not so many sinews.


_Lysias and Isocrates_

Lysias, older than these, is subtle and elegant, and if it is enough for
the orator to instruct, none could be found more perfect than he is.
There is nothing idle, nothing far-fetched in him; yet is he more like a
clear brook than a great river. Isocrates, in a different kind of
eloquence, is fine and polished, and better adapted for engaging in a
mock than a real battle. He was attentive to all the beauties of
discourse, and had his reasons for it, having intended his eloquence for
schools and not for contentions at the bar. His invention was easy, he
was very fond of graces and embellishments, and so nice was he in his
composition that his extreme care is not without reprehension.


_Plato_

Among philosophers, by whom Cicero confesses he has been furnished with
many resourceful aids to eloquence, who doubts that Plato is the chief,
whether we consider the acuteness of his dissertations, or his divine
Homerical faculty of elocution? He soars high above prose, and even
common poetry, which is poetry only because comprised in a certain
number of feet; and he seems to me not so much endowed with the wit of
a man, as inspired by a sort of Delphic oracle.


_Xenophon_