(2) vocal expression is not necessary to the artistic and forcible embodiment of thought; (3) they are distinct, so much so that great strength in either may consist with great weakness in the other. Many excellent actors have been utterly unable to construct an oration, while many excellent composers have been miserable speakers.

An argument, however, may violate no rule, either of grammar or of logic, and may also be faultlessly pronounced, yet fail of the intended effect. In other words, rhetoric has requirements of its own.

It takes the thoughts thus grammatically and logically approved, and so clothes them, so arranges them, as to make the product pleasing, forceful, effective.

The laws of labor and method are equally binding upon genius and mediocrity. The common artisan owes his utmost proficiency to perfect familiarity with rules, if not with their foundation,- a forgetfulness of them in their unconscious application. Phidias will be vainly afire with the conception of Jove unless he has a prior knowledge of anatomy, and uses his chisel with painstaking care, systematically, though at last without formal teaching. The genius of Beethoven will avail nothing to the composer unless he conforms to the laws of musical form, orchestration and harmony. Always there is the search for means suited to an end. Will you do as well with scattered as with concentrated forces, as well without meditation as with it, without purpose as with it, without order as with it? Yet such is art-the assemblage of the means for making or doing a thing. To exclude it—that is, to exclude reflection or the use of method- -is simply to renounce perfection. Art by exercising itself becomes what habit is in the moral life-second nature, intelligent instinct, involuntary observance of rule. This is precisely the case with Shakespeare, as attested by the Eulogy of Ben Jonson:

Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,
My gentle Shakespear, must enjoy a part;
For though the poet's matter Nature be,
His art doth give the fashion; and that he
Who casts to write a living line must sweat,
(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat
Upon the Muses' anvil; turn the same

(And himself with it) that he thinks to frame;
Or for the laurel he may gain a scorn,

For a good poet's made as well as born,

And such wert thou. Look how the father's face
Lives in his issue, even so the race

Of Shakespear's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned and true-filed lines,

In each of which he seems to shake a lance,

As brandished at the eyes of Ignorance.

The rules of rhetoric are but a concise general expression of the manner in which it has been found that the masters have achieved success. They are generalized experience, and experience is, in all spheres, a teacher which inspired men cannot reject, to which ordinary men must attend. 'He who will not answer to the rudder must answer to the rocks.'

Perhaps all serious opposition to the art has arisen from the abuse of it, either to hide the want of sense with excess of sound and ornament, or to hoodwink the judgment by alluring the fancy, like Milton's Belial, whose tongue

Dropp'd manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash

Maturest counsels.

But, on the one hand, rhetoric does not undertake to remedy barrenness, to furnish vitalizing energy or native power-without which all art must be the merest surfacework. On the other, it is no conclusion against the excellence of the fashion, that a gentleman's livery may be worn by a rogue. Rhetoric, taking no note of differ

ences in men, regards only their universal natural practice when they speak or write well, be they gifted or not, leaving to every one the full, free use of his peculiar resources to effect his freely chosen ends.

To exercise the imagination and improve the taste, with their attendant happy effects on life, by bringing into view the chief beauties that ought to be imitated and the leading defects that ought to be shunned; to unlearn bad habits; to substitute the best models for the worst or the indifferent; to cultivate accurate thinking, as well as accurate speaking, by the careful practice of putting our sentiments into words according to law; to enable the person of brain and emotion to put himself in communication with the minds and hearts of others under the most favorable circumstances; to guide and develop; to shorten the time and the uncertainty of walking in the dark;such are the utilities, subjective and objective, on which we rest the dignity and merit of the present study. Let us define Rhetoric, therefore, as the art of enabling those who have something to say, to say it to the best advantage.

CHAPTER II.

UNIT OF EXPRESSION-THE SENTENCE.

A form of speech which hath a beginning and an end within itself, and is of such length as to be easily comprehended at once.-ARISTOTLE.

CONSIDER

NSIDERED as an internal consciousness, the recognition of congruence or confliction between two objects of thought is called a judgment; as expressed in language, it is called a proposition. An act of thought is thus a process of comparison in which three elements are involved: the determined or qualified notion, technically called the Subject; the determining or qualifying notion, called the Predicate, the affirmation or denial of identity between these two, called the Copula. The regular form for the copula is, affirmatively, the substantive 'is'; negatively, 'is not.' Thus —

Philosophy is the science of realities.-Emerson.

Each is bound to all.-Spencer.

Heaven is not to be expected in this world.-Dr. A. Alexander. It should here be remarked that copula and predicate often coalesce, as

Do to-day thy nearest duty.-Goethe.

Men can now believe everything but the Bible.-Napoleon.

A single proposition, however much expanded by the modification of its essential parts, constitutes a simple

sentence:

Artists are nearest God.-Holland.

The human heart refuses to believe in a universe without a purpose.-Kant.

Through these watery solitudes, among the fountains of the great deep, the abode of perpetual silence, never visited by living human presence and beyond the sight of human eye, there are gliding to and fro, by night and by day, in light and in darkness, in calm and in tempest, currents of human thought, borne by the electric pulse. -Bryant.

If the sentence consists of several propositions, one of which is leading and the others dependent or subordinate, it is said to be complex:

The command that the waters should be gathered was the command that the earth should be sculptured.-Ruskin.

The most foolish of all errors is, that clever young heads think that they lose their originality when they recognize the truth which has already been recognized by others.-Goethe.

The highest minds live in thought with the great dead far more than [they live] with the living, and, next to the dead, with those ideal human beings yet to come, whom they are destined never to see.-Comte.

If the sentence consists of two or more coördinate combinations of subject, predicate, and copula, it is said to be compound. The mutually independent divisions- often called members-may themselves be complex:

I did not fall into love - I rose into love.-Bulwer.

Not only strike while the iron is hot, but make it hot by striking.-Cromwell.

The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus, as, like primitive fire-worshippers, they hail the return of light and warmth to the world, is unrivalled.-Lowell.

A judgment may be expressed categorically —

To do is to succeed.-Schiller.

Conditionally

Could we rest, we must become smaller in soul.-Robertson.

Old truths are always new to us, if they come with the smell of

Love me, and tell me so sometimes.-Gail Hamilton.