QUINTILIAN (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), a celebrated rhetorician and critic, who flourished in the first century of the Christian era. His life, written by an unknown author, is prefixed to several editions of his works. From it we learn that he was born at Rome, though under what consuls, or in what reign, is unknown; and that no credit is due to the tradition which makes him a native of Calagurris or Çalahorra, in Spain, since he is not amongst the number of the Iberians whom Martial has celebrated. In fact, that poet names him apart from any others, and, in the homage which he pays, clearly intimates that he was a Roman.

Quintiliane vagae moderator summe juventae, Gloria Romanae, Quintiliane, togae.

Quintilian calls himself the son of an advocate, and informs us besides that, in his youth, he was acquainted with Domitius Afer and Seneca, who both perished under Nero. Seneca speaks of Quintilian, a deςlaimer, the grandfather of him who so long taught rhetoric at Rome. Domitian intrusted the instruction of his grand-nephews to Quintilian; and another pupil of his, C. Caelius, became the best orator of the time. Having married a lady of a noble family, Quintilian had the grief to lose her, as well as one of the sons she had brought him; an affliction which he experienced soon after he had composed his book on the causes of the corruption of eloquence. He then wrote his books of rhetoric, but whilst engaged in the composition of the work, he lost his other son. His daughter, whom he had by a second wife, married Novius Celer, a mari of distinction. The anonymous author concludes by stating that he does not know in what year Quintilian died.

According to the calculations of Dodwell, he rriust have been born in the year 42 of our era, and must have died under Hadrian, some time between the years 117 andT38. Those who hold him to have been a Spaniard, say that he was brought to Rome by Galba; and the same thing is stated in the chronicle of Eusebius. But Quintilian himself assures us that at Rome he was acquainted with Domitius Afer; and the death of this orator took place in the year 55 of our era. Dodwell, therefore, conjectures that in 61 Quintilian followed Galba into Spain, where he taught rhetoric pleaded causes, and in the year 68 returned to Rome with the same émperor. From this time until the year 88 he gave lessons in rhetoric, a public provision having been attached to this function by Galba, according to Dodwell; by Domitian, according to the chronicle of Eusebius; by Vespasian, according to Suetonius. At the same time, Quintilian shone at the bar, where his pleadings attracted so much notice that they were written out and sold. He enjoyed an honourable degree of credit, and, according to Juvenal, a considerable fortune; which, howevèr, accords but indifferently with the present that he received from Pliny the younger, as a portion to his daughter. It is possible, indeed, that Pliny, in mentioning this fact, may be speaking of a different Quintilian; but it may be observed, that no other rhetorician of the name is known at the time here referred to. Dodwell supposes that the author of the Institutiones Oratoriae was consul in the year 117,‘and others that he held this dignity either before or after this date.* Some words of Ausonius and∖Invenal have led to this conclusion, but neither of these writers has expressly mentioned the fact.

If it be difficult, however, to ascertain the details of his v life, it is easy enough to recognise the eminent merit of his work, forming, as it does, the most complete course of rhetoric which the ancients have left us. Of this work Gibert and Laharpe have both given very ample analyses. The first book treats of the education of the orator; the second, of the art of oratory in general; the following, of invention, arrangement, elocution, memory, and action; the twelfth and last, of the manners and character of the orator, or rather of the advocate. The author loves to descend to details of all sorts, sometimes even to those relating to grammar; and, besides, he intermingles with his precepts so many observations, and, above all, so many facts, that his work is indispensable for acquiring a competent knowledge of the literary history of antiquity. The gravest fault which has yet been detected in the work, consists in the praises lavished upon Domitian; a deformity which, in the eyes of Bayle, Dodwell, and even Gibert, is alike disgusting and inexcusable. In a literary point of view, it may be observed that Quintilian, in citing and contradicting the rhetoricians who have preceded him, particularly Aristotle, does not always seize the true import of their words, 1 and consequently ascribes to them doctrines they never maintained, and precepts they never inculcated. In other respects, if his work be long, it is also full; and all the obscurity we find in it is reduced to some details of which all trace was effaced soon after his time, and which he does not explain sufficiently for us, because they were familiar to his Roman readers. The enumeration which he has made of more than a hundred figures is of more importance than is commonly supposed to the theory of language and of thought. Nevertheless, Rollin took the trouble of abridging this rhetoric, in order to render it more accessible and more useful to youth, and retrenched nearly a fourth of the [7:18:795]original work; but, in our opinion, it would be much better to leave classical books as they are, especially when they inspire only pure tastes and virtuous sentiments.

In point of style, the work of Quintilian has no pretensions to equal or be compared with the treatises of Cicero on the art of oratory; but it is nevertheless written with much sagacity and elegance. Severe censors have thought that the preface of the sixth book savours of declamation. The author therein deplores the loss of his second son, which he had just sustained, and retraces the recollections of another son, and of a young wife, whom death had also removed. But,, to say the truth, the expression of his grief is not so simple or so natural as could be wished; and, in the concluding part, we perceive almost as much of the rhetorician as. of the father. This preface, however, is read with interest, and has no resemblance to the Declamations, of which a long and useless collection has been published under the name of Quintilian. They are distinguished into great and small; the former, nineteen in number, and the latter, a hundred and forty-five, being all that remain of three hundred and eighty-eight. Philelphus, Vives, and especially Erasmus, have shown that the nineteen great declamations could not have proceeded from the pen of Quintilian. In fact, there are manuscripts which assign them to Μ. Florus; and a text of Trebellius Pollio would authorize the belief that they were the work of Postumus the younger, one of the thirty tyrants: “Postumus...ita in declamationibus disertus, ut ejus controversiae Quintiliano dicantur insertae.” Notwithstanding the authority of several manuscripts, and that of Lactantius, Ennodius, and Vincent de Beauvais, we cannot discover in. them a trace of Quintilian. The difference is too sensible, even in the diction; he never could have written dilectio, discretio, impaenitens, lenocinamentum, and other expressions belonging to a class which he must have strongly condemned. As to the hundred and forty-five smaller declamations, if they were really his, they might have been extracts from his pleadings, collected by the tachygraphers. Perhaps they belonged to his father or his grandfather, or some other person of the same name; perhaps they were the productions of different authors and different ages, which the inequalities observed in them seem almost to indicate. But the circumstance which has most puzzled the learned, is the distinction of these pieces into two kinds; the coloratae, and the tractatae. May not this second qualification have been applied to those the subjects of which had really been treated, and the first to such as invested imaginary themes with all the colours of rhetorical embellishment? or, if another supposition be admissible, may not the tractatae have been the simple expositions of causes, whilst the coloratae were such as admitted of embellishment?

A production, however, which would do much more honour to Quintilian, were he really the author of it, is the dialogue De Causis oorruptae Eloquxntiae. He had certainly composed a treatise bearing this title; for, in the preface to the sixth book of his Institutions, he expressly mentions the fact; but on referring to the same treatise at the end of the eighth,-he, says that he has there spoken more at large of tropes, and particularly of hyperbole, which is not in accordance with the dialogue, the interlocutors in which are Aper, -Maternus, Julius Secundus, and Vipsanius Messala. Pierre Pithon, Colomies, Dodwell, and many other learned men, have preferred ascribing it to Tacitus; and one of the grounds on which this opinion rests is the character of the political observations scattered throughout this little work. Besides, in several manuscripts, Tacitus is dis-tinqtly pointed out as its author. But it .may not be the production either of the one or of the other. It has sometimes been ascribed to Suetonius, who, in his ascertained writings, has not the same force of thought and expression; and, in Vitogsbprne’s Letters^ a very strong case has* been made out in favour of Pliny the younger, although the latter has produced nothing under his own name which can be compared with this admirable dialogue. The treatise which Quintilian had composed on the causes of the corruption of eloquence, is not the only one of his productions which has perished.. We have also lost his elementary rhetoric, in two books; and there remains no other authentic work of his but the Institutions, which had themselves nearly disappeared. This treatise existed in the middle ages, when it was known to and cited by Cassiodorus, Isidore of Seville, Loup de Ferrière, and Vincent de Beauvais. The manuscript which Petrarch consulted appears to have been in several respects defective; but that which, in 1419, Poggio discovered in the Abbey of Saint Gall, restored Quintilian to the light of day. Amongst the eminent services which Poggio rendered to letters, the discovery in question is not one of the least important. It is beyond a doubt, however, that the literati of the fifteenth century possessed at least defective copies of Quintilian; in proof of which wè may refer to that letter of Leonardo Aretino, where he speaks with so much emphasis of the new apparition of this classic, at the same time declaring that he had long read and admired the half of the Institutiones Orettoriae. These two manuscripts of Saint Gall and Leonardo Aretino were the sources of all those since made, as well as of the copies printed.

The first two editions of the Institutions of Quintilian appeared at Rome in 1470, the one printed by Udalricus Gallus, the other by Sweynheym and Pannartz, and both in folio. The fifteenth century produced tén others; and amongst the great number of the sixteenth may be distinguished, at Venice, thosé of the Aiduses, 1514, in 4to, and at Paris, those of Vacosan, 1538, in folio; of Simon de Colincs, 1541, in 4to; of Robert Etienne, 1542, in 4to; and of Mamert Patisson, 1580, in 8vo. This last was revised by Pierre Pithou, who added to it various readings, notes, and the hundred and forty-five small Declamations, of which there had yet appeared only a hundred and thirty-six. Schrevelius, and after him J. Frederic Gronovius, took charge of the edition which appeared at Leyden and Rotterdam, *1665, in 8vo, cum notis variorum. Here all the Declamations are joined to the Institutions, as in that of Strasbourg, which appeared in 1698, in 4to. In 1715, Rollin published his Quintilian abridged, Paris, apud the Etiennes, in two vols. 12mo. In the edition of 1720, which appeared at Leyden, in two vols. 4to, Peter Burmann profited by the labours of his predecessors on this author, including the Annales Quintilianei of Dodwell. Capronnier published at Paris, 1725, an edition in folio, with a selection of notes, and some critical observations, which offended Burmann, who replied, with all the intemperance of an enraged grammarian. But the edition of Mathias Gesner, Göttingen, 1738, in 4to, is more esteemed than either of the two preceding. Then followed that of Barbou, 1769, in 12mo; that of Deux-Ponts, 1784, in four vols. 4to; and that of Leipzig, 1719-1815, in four vols. 8yo, under the care of G. L. Spalding. .The Institutions have been translated into the principal modern languages of Europe; into French, first by the Abbé de Pure, and second by Gédoyn; into Italian by Orazio Toscanella; into English, first by Guthrie, and next by Pastal; into German by Henke; into Spanish by two professors of the Charitable Schools in Madrid; and into Danish by Schlegel. Of the dialogue De Causis corruptae Eloquentiae there are also several translations, all of them French. The principal notices to be consulted respecting the life and works of Quintilian are, the Annales Quintilianei of Dodwell; Baylc⅛ Dictionary; Fabricius, Bibliotheca Latina ; Gibert, Jugements des Savants sur les lìhétenrs ; and the Lycée of Laharpe. (a.)