Institutio Oratoria

Or

what further use can I hope to be on earth, when heaven thus frowns upon me? For it so chances that just at the moment when I began my book on the causes of the decline of eloquence, I was stricken by a like affliction. Better had I thrown that illomened work and all my ill-starred learning upon the flames of that untimely pyre that was to consume the darling of my heart, and had not sought to burden my unnatural persistence in this wicked world with the fatigue of fresh labours!