"anyone who takes great pleasure in Cicero can have good hopes of himself."
Petrarch in a 1374 autobiographical letter to Luca de Penna (Epist. de rebus senilibus XVI.1 = Epistolae selectae ed. A. F. Johnson (1923), 198 and Racine in a letter to his son (4 October 1692) (Russell 23)

"It is impertinent, Erasmus says in De ratione studii ac legendi (CWE 24. 672), to write about teaching after Quintilian; and if Quintilian had only gone into more detail, De copia (CWE 24. 297) would never have been needed)." (Russell 24)

"It should be remembered that this kind of teaching continued well into the nineteenth century, especially in France and countries under French influence...." (Russell 26)

It continued also in America, but with different emphases, and with less and less direct relationship to the classical authorities. And it persisted even through periods when "rhetorical". came to be a synonym of "insincere" or "mechanical," and rhetoric came to be thought of not as a normative system which should aid and control literary composition, but as an object of historical scholarship, to be studied in the light of the social circumstances which gave rise to it. (Russell 26)

"In the English-speaking world, a series of famous lectures on rhetoric tell a story, which is not very different. Adam Smith's Glasgow lectures on 'Rhetoric and Belles Lettres' were first given in 1748, but were not published till our own time, when a student's notes were discovered (Quintilian would have sympathized: see 1 prooem. 7) and edited (best by J. C. Bryce, Oxford 1983). Belles lettres in the title is significant: the lectures contain much that is directed more towards the private study of literature in general than towards the practical oratory or the bar. The same is true of a more famous work with the same title. Said by some to plagiarize Adam Smith, namely the Edinburgh lectures of Hugh Blair first given in 1754, and published in 1783, and in many subsequent editions. Blair's admiration Quintilian is practically unbounded; he even cautiously recommends the "dry and tedious technical parts (i.e. Books V and VI) as useful to "pleaders at the bar." But, like Smith, he is primarily concerned to instill good literary taste, on principles applicable to modern as well as to classical literature (Kennedy (1980) 233-240; G. L. Hatch, QHAR 3. 1336-1345 gives a useful brief account). John Quincy Adams's famous Harvard lectures of 1806 are more Quintilianic, more practical, and less aesthetic; but his example was not followed, and the chair which he held was later converted into a professorship of poetry. Rhetoric, divorced from classical scholarship, went its own way (Kennedy (1980) 240)" (Russell 27-28).