totle and Demosthenes had
reached manhood (being then 34), had attained a considerable mass; as
one may see at a glance from Jebb's chronology attached to his Primer.
There was a splendid poetical library, including all the great
tragedians, with the older and the middle Comedy. There were the three
great historians--Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon; and the
orators--- Lysias, Isocrates, and Isaeus; there were the precursors of
Socrates in Philosophy; and, finally, the Platonic Dialogues. To
overtake all these would employ several years of learned leisure; and to
imbibe their substance would be a rich and varied culture, especially of
the poetic and rhetorical kind. To make the most of the field, a
judicious procedure would be very helpful; there was evident scope for
an art of study. The fertile intellect of the Greeks produced the first
systematic guides to high culture; the Rhetorical art for Oratory and
Poetry, the Logical art for Reasoning, and the Eristic art for
Disputation. There was nothing precisely corresponding to an Art of
Study, but there were examples of the self-culture of celebrated men.
The most notorious of these is Demosthenes; of whom we know that, while
he took special lessons in the art of oratory, he also bestowed
extraordinary pains upon the general cultivation of his intellectual
powers. His application to Thucydides in particular is recounted in
terms of obvious mythical exaggeration; showing, nevertheless, his idea
of fixing upon a special book with a view to extracting from it every
particle of intellectual nourishment that it could yield: in which we
have an example of the art of study as I have defined it. Then, it is
said that, in his anxiety to master his author, he copied the entire
work eight times, with his own hand, and had it by heart _verbatim_, so
as to be able to re-write it when the manuscripts were accidentally
destroyed. Both points enter into the art of study, and will come under
review in the sequel.

We do not possess from the genius of Aristotle--the originator or
improver of so many practical departments--an Art of Study. The omission
was not supplied by any other Greek writer known to us. The oratorical
art was a prominent part of education both in Greece and in Rome; and
was discussed by many authors--notably by Cicero himself; but the
exhaustive treatment is found in Quintilian. The very wide scope of the
"Institutes of Oratory" comprises a chapter upon the orator's