Lord Byron: The Perils and Glories of a Classical Education

Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord? Can we not hire some Abelard to lecture to us?

Percy Shelley in “A Defense of Poetry,”

Ambrose, while he was eminent as a statesman, was, in other respects, merely typical of his age. He wrote, like other ecclesiastical authors, a treatise in praise of virginity, and another deprecating the remarriage of widows. When he had decided on the site for his new cathedral, two skeletons (revealed in a vision, it was said) were conveniently

The great writer on rhetorical technique and education Quintilian—who lived a generation after Seneca—famously criticized Seneca’s style for being “corrupt” and a bad influence on the youth of his own time. Seneca, he insists, is a dangerous model for the young because his writing is full of unnatural turns of phrase, “faults” that are all too easy