We see not a few mortals who, striving to emulate this divine
virtue with more zeal than success, fall into a feeble and
disjointed loquacity, obscuring the subject and burdening the
wretched ears of their hearers with a vacant mass of words and
sentences crowded together beyond all possibility of enjoyment. And
writers who have tried to lay down the principles of this art have
gained no other result than to display their own poverty while
expounding abundance.
--_Erasmus on "Preaching"_