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for searching only. deferred to the fourth class. After Cicero no one is more useful than Terence for a pure and Roman style. These things will occupy the first two hours. The third hour is devoted to composition. Virgil will aid in verse composition, the three notebooks in prose. The fourth hour is given to correction of the compositions. If any time is left, spend it upon Caesar and Terence alternately.
In the fifth class, the boy repeats his previous precepts and proceeds to the Greek precepts. For the first six months some part of the Greek grammar is learned every day, for the next three Aesop's fables, for the last three the Olynthiacs of Demosthenes. This ac-counts for one hour for the year. A second hour goes to Cicero's De Officiis, if the three books which were prescribed for the preceding form have been completed. For the third hour might be devoted to this if it cannot be completed without undue haste, since it is more useful to exercise the boy here twice a day on Cicero, even at the expense of the poets. For the first three months, the Georgics are scheduled for this third hour, but for the remaining nine months some oration of Cicero as Pro lege Manilla or Pro Q. Ligario. The fourth hour is given to writing and composition. joined to this should be the rhetorical books on ornaments of speech. These ornaments (tropes and schemes) should be sought in the third book of Cicero's De Oratore and his Orator, but explained from Hermogenes. For elocutio should precede inventio, because the single ornaments of oration are easier to understand. Inventio is better learned in actual composition than from precepts. The boys should get greater copy of words, and formulas of sententiae. So with exercise of the pen and correction of writings should be joined the partitions of modes and figures, which in teaching should be pointed out singly, but for application mixed and varied in authors.
In the fourth class, Greek and Latin are equally balanced, Demosthenes with Cicero and Homer with Virgil for two hours. For the third hour in the first six months the Greek grammar should be completed. Rhetorical precepts will occupy the fourth place along with the pen, which begins to be more ornate and conformable to the precepts. The Partitiones of Cicero surpass all rhetorical books if rightly explained and committed to memory. But the first book of .1d Herennium might with profit first be rapidly taught. Sallust and Plautus might be joined after these precepts, not for examples, which are to be taken from Cicero and Demosthenes, but as history and noteworthy writing.
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