d at
Rome that I may quote it here.[247]

"As its outcome at the age of twenty-one we may imagine a bronzed and
hardy youth, healthy in body and mind, able to bear hunger and hard
physical labour ... not untouched by studies which awake in men the
interest of civilised beings, and prepare them for the right use of
leisure in future years, and though burdened with little knowledge,
possessed of an educated sense of beauty, and an ingrained love of
what is noble and hatred of all that is the reverse. He would be
more cultivated and human than the best type of young Spartan, more
physically vigorous and reverential, though less intellectually
developed, than the best type of young Athenian--a nascent soldier and
servant of the state, not, like most young Athenians of ability, a
nascent orator. And as he would be only half way through his education
at an age when many Greeks had finished theirs, he would be more
conscious of his own immaturity. We feel at once how different he
would be from the clever lads who swarmed at Athens, youths with an
infinite capacity for picking holes, and capable of saying something
plausible on every subject under the sun."

If we note, with Mr. Newman, that Aristotle here makes if anything too
little of intellectual training (as indeed may also be said of our
own public schools), and add to his picture something more of that
knowledge which, when united with an honest will and healthy body,
will almost infallibly produce a sound judgment, we shall have a type
of character eminently fitted to share in the duties and the trials of
the government of such empires as the Roman and the British. But at
Rome, in the age of Cicero, such a type of character was rare indeed;
and though this was due to various causes, some of which have been
already noticed,--the building up of a Roman empire before the Romans
were ripe to appreciate the duties of an imperial state, and the
sudden incoming of wealth in an age when the idea of its productive
use was almost unknown,--yet it will occur to every reader that there
must have been also something wrong in the upbringing of the youth of
the upper classes to account for the rarity of really sound character,
for the frequent absence of what we should call the sense of duty,
public and private. I propose in this chapter to deal with the
question of Roman education just so far as to show where in Cicero's
time it was chiefly defective. It is a subject that has been