could not persuade ourselves that it was by accident that the topics, or general heads of argument, were never in an absolute and unconditional sense true-but contained so much of plausible or colourable truth as is expressed in the original meaning of the word probable. A ratio probabilis, in the Latin use of the word probabilis, is that ground of assent-not which the understanding can solemnly approve and abide by-but the very opposite to this; one which it can submit to for a moment, and countenance as within the limits of the plausible.* That this was the real governing law of Aristotle's procedure, it was not possible to doubt: but was it consciously known to himself? If so, how was it to be reconciled with his own formal account of the office of rhetoric, so often repeated, that it consisted in finding enthymemes? What then was an enthymeme?

Oxford! thou wilt think us mad to ask. Certainly we knew, what all the world knows, that an enthymeme was understood to be a syllogism of which one proposition is suppressedmajor, minor, or conclusion. But what possible relation had that to rhetoric? Nature sufficiently prompts all men to that sort of ellipsis; and what impertinence in a teacher to build his whole system upon a solemn precept to do this or that, when the rack would not have forced any man to do otherwise! Besides, Aristotle had represented it as the fault of former systems, that they applied themselves exclusively to the treatment of the passions-an object foreign to the purpose of the rhetorician, who, in some situations, is absolutely forbidden by law to use any such arts: whereas, says he, his true and universal weapon is the enthymeme, which is open to him everywhere. Now what opposition, or what relation of any kind, can be imagined between the system which he rejects and the one he adopts, if the enthymeme is to be understood as it usually has been? The rhetorician is not to

address the passions, but-what? to mind that, in all his arguments, he suppresses one of his propositions ! And these follies are put into the mouth of Aristotle.

In this perplexity a learned Scottish friend communicated to us an Essay of Facciolati's, read publicly about a century ago (Nov. 1724), and entitled De Enthymemate,t in which he maintains, that the received idea of the enthymeme is a total blunder, and triumphantly restores the lost idea. "Nego," says he, "nego enthymema esse syllogismum mutilum, ut vulgo dialectici docent. Nego, inquam, et pernego enthymema enunciatione unà et conclusione constare, quamvis ita in scholis omnibus finiatur, et a nobis ipsis finitum sit aliquando-nolentibus extra locum lites suscipere." I deny peremptorily that an enthymeme consists of one premiss and the conclu-, sion: although that doctrine has been laid down universally in the schools, and upon one occasion even by myself, as unwilling to move the question un seasonably.

Facciolati is not the least accurate of logicians, because he happens to be the most elegant. Yet, we apprehend, that at such innovations, Smiglecius will stir in his grave; Keckermannus will groan; "Dutch Burgersdyk” will snort; and English Crackenthorpius, (who has the honour to be an ancestor of Mr Wordsworth's,) though buried for two centuries, will revisit the glimpses of the moon. And really, if the question were for a name, Heaven forbid that we should disturb the peace of logicians: they might have leave to say, as of the Strid in Wharfdale,

"It has borne that name a thousand years,

And shall a thousand more."

But, whilst the name is abused, the idea perishes. Facciolati undoubtedly is right: nor is he the first who has observed the error. Julius Pacius, who understood Aristotle better than any man that ever lived, had long be fore remarked it. The arguments of

pressing one of its propositions; either may do this, or neither; the difference is essential, and in the nature of the matter; that of the syllogism being certain and apodeictic; that of the enthymeme probable, and drawn from the province of opinion.

This theory tallies exactly with our own previous construction of Aristotle's rhetoric, and explains the stress which he had laid at the outset upon enthymemes. Whatsoever is certain, or matter of fixed science, can be no subject for the rhetorician: where it is possible for the understanding to be convinced, no field is open for rhetorical persuasion. Absolute certainty, and fixed science, transcend and exclude opinion and probability. The province of rhetoric, whether meant for an influence upon the actions, or simply upon the belief, lies amongst that vast field of cases where there is a pro and a con, with the chance of right and wrong, true and false, distributed in varying proportions between them. There is also an immense range of truths, where there are no chances at all concerned, but the affirmative and the negative are both true; as, for example, the goodness of human nature and its wickedness; the hap piness of human life and its misery; the charms of knowledge, and its hollowness; the fragility of human prosperity, in the eye of religious meditation, and its security, as estimated by worldly confidence and youthful hope. In all these cases the rhetorician exhibits his art by giving an impulse to one side, and by withdrawing the mind so steadily from all thoughts or images which support the other, as to leave it practically under the possession of this partial estimate.

Upon this theory, what relation to rhetoric shall we assign to style and the ornamental arts of composition? In some respect they seem liable to the same objection as that which Aristotle has urged against appeals to the passions; both are extra-essential, or 1⁄2w to wрa[paros; they are subjective arts, not objective; that is, they do not affect the thing which is to

be surveyed, but the eye of him who is to survey. Yet, in a feast, the epicure holds himself not more obliged to the cook for the venison, than to the physician who braces his stomach to enjoy. And any arts, which conciliate regard to the speaker, indirectly promote the effect of his arguments. On this account, and because, (under the severest limitation of rhetoric) they are in many cases indispensable to the perfect interpretation of the thoughts; we may admit arts of style and ornamental composition as the ministerial part of rhetoric. But, with regard to the passions, as contended for by Dr Campbell,-it is a sufficient answer, that they are already preoccupied by what is called Eloquence.

Mr Coleridge, as we have often heard, is in the habit of drawing the line with much philosophical beauty between rhetoric and eloquence. Ou this topic we were never so fortunate as to hear him: but if we are here called upon for a distinction, we shall satisfy our immediate purpose by a very plain and brief one. By Eloquence, we understand the overflow of powerful feelings upon occasions fitted to excite them. But Rhetoric is the art of aggrandizing and bringing out into strong relief, by means of various and striking thoughts, some aspect of truth which of itself is supported by no spontaneous feelings, and therefore rests upon artificial aids.

Greece, as may well be imagined, was the birth-place of Rhetoric; to which of the Fine Arts was it not? and here, in one sense of the word Rhetoric, the art had its consumma tion: for the theory, or ars docens, was taught with a fulness and an accuracy by the Grecian masters, not afterwards approached. In particular, it was so taught by Aristotle, whose system, we are disposed to agree with Dr Whately, in pronouncing the best, as regards the primary purpose of a teacher; though otherwise, for elegance, and as a practical model in the art he was expounding, neither Aristotle, nor any less austere among the Greek rhetoricians, has any preten

για τον.

sions to measure himself with Quintilian. In reality, for a triumph over the difficulties of the subject, and as a lesson on the possibility of imparting grace to the treatment of scholastic topics, naturally as intractable as that of Grammar or Prosody, there is no such chef-d'œuvre to this hour in any literature, as the Institutions of Quintilian. Laying this one case out of the comparison, however, the Greek superiority was indisputable.

Yet how is it to be explained, that with these advantages on the side of the Greek rhetoric as an ars docens, rhetoric as a practical art (the ars utens) never made any advances amongst the Greeks to the brilliancy which it attained in Rome? Up to a certain period, and throughout the palmy state of the Greek republics, we may account for it thus: Rhetoric, in its finest and most absolute burnish, may be called an eloquentia umbratica; that is, it aims at an elaborate form of beauty, which shrinks from the strife of business, and could neither arise nor make itself felt in a tumultuous assembly. Certain features, it is well known, and peculiar styles of countenance, which are impressive in a draw ing-room, become ineffective on a pub lic stage. The fine tooling, and delicate tracery, of the cabinet artist is lost upon a building of colossal proportions. Extemporaneousness, again, a favourable circumstance to impas sioned eloquence, is death to Rhetoric. Two characteristics indeed there were, of a Greek popular assembly, which must have operated fatally on the rhetorician-its fervour, in the first place, and, secondly, the coarseness of a real interest. All great rhetoricians, in se lecting their subject, have shunned the determinate cases of real life: and even in the single instance of a deviation from the rule-that of the author (whoever he be) of the Declamations attributed to Quintilian, the cases are shaped with so romantic a generality, and so slightly circumstantiated, as to allow him all the benefit of pure abstractions.

We can readily understand, therefore, why the fervid oratory of the Athenian Assemblies, and the intense reality of its interest, should stifle the growth of Rhetoric: the smoke, tarnish, and demoniac glare of Vesuvius easily eclipse the pallid coruscations of the Aurora Borealis. And in fact,

amongst the greater orators of Greece, there is not a solitary gleam of rhetoric: Isocrates may have a little, being (to say the truth) neither orator nor rhetorician in any eminent sense; Demosthenes has none. But when those great thunders had subsided, which reached "to Macedon, and Artaxerxes' throne," when the "fierce democracy" itself had perished, and Greece had fallen under the common circumstances of the Roman Empire, how came it that Greek rhetoric did not blossom concurrently with Roman? Vegetate it did: and a rank crop of weeds grew up under the name of Rhetoric, down to the times of the Emperor Julian and his friend Libanius (both of whom, by the way, were as worthless writers as have ever abused the Greek language.) But this part of Greek literature is a desert with no oasis. The fact is, if it were required to assign the two bodies of writers who have exhibited the human understanding in the most abject poverty, and whose works by no possibility emit a casual scintillation of wit, fancy, just thinking, or good writing, we should certainly fix upon Greek rhetoricians, and Italian critics. Amongst the whole mass there is not a page, that any judicious friend to literature would wish to reprieve from destruction. And in both cases we apprehend that the possibility of so much inanity is due in part to the quality of the two languages. The diffuseness and loose structure of Greek style unfit it for the closeness, conden sation, and to aspopov of rhetoric; the melodious beauty of the mere sounds, which both in the Italian and in the Greek are combined with much majesty, dwells upon the ear so delightfully, that in no other language is it so easy as in these two to write with little or no meaning, and to flow along through a whole wilderness of inanity, without particularly rousing the reader's disgust.

In the literature of Rome it is that we find the true El Dorado of rhetoric, as we might expect from the sinewy compactness of the language. Livy, and, above all preceding writers, Ovid, display the greatest powers of rhetoric in forms of composition, which were not particularly adapted to favour that talent. The contest of Ajax and Ulysses, for the arms of Achilles, in one of the latter Books of the Metamorphoses, is a chef

d'œuvre of rhetoric, considering its metrical form; for metre, and especially the flowing heroic hexameter, is no advantage to the rhetorician. The two Plinys, Lucan, (though again under the disadvantage of verse) Petronius Arbiter, and Quintilian, but above all, the Senecas, (for a Spanish cross appears to improve the quality of the rhetorician) have left a body of rhetorical composition such as no inodern nation has rivalled. Even the most brilliant of these writers, how ever, were occasionally surpassed, in particular bravuras of rhetoric, by several of the Latin Fathers, particularly Tertullian, Arnobius, St Austin, and a writer whose name we cannot at this moment recall. In fact, a little African blood operated as genially in this respect as Spanish, whilst an Asiatic cross was inevitably fatal. Partly from this cause, and partly because they wrote in an unfavourable language, the Greek Fathers are, one and all, mere Birmingham rhetoricians. Even Gregory Nazianzen is so, with submission to Messieurs of the Port Royal, and other bigoted critics, who have pronounced him at the very top of the tree among the fine writers of antiquity. Undoubtedly, he has a turgid style of mouthy grandiloquence, (though often the merest bombast ;) but for keen and polished rhetoric he is singularly unfitted, by inflated habits of thinking, by loitering diffuseness, and a dreadful trick of calling names. The spirit of personal invective is peculiarly adverse to the coolness of rhetoric. As to Chrysostom, and Basil, with less of pomp and swagger than Gregory, they have not at all more of rhetorical burnish and compression. Upon the whole, looking back through the dazzling files of the ancient rhetoricians, we are disposed to rank the Senecas and Tertullian as the leaders of the band: for St Austin, in his Confessions, and wherever he becomes peculiarly interesting, is apt to be impassioned and fervent in a degree which makes him break out of the proper pace of rhe

toric. He is matched to trot, and is continually breaking into a gallop. Indeed, his Confessions have in parts, particularly in those which relate to the death of his young friend, and his own frenzy of grief, all that real passion which is only imagined in the Confessions of Rousseau, under a preconception derived from his known character and unhappy life. By the time of the Emperor Justinian, or in the century between that time and the era of Mahomet, (A.D. 620,) which century we regard as the common crepusculum between ancient and modern history, all rhetoric, of every degree and quality, seems to have finally expired.

In the literature of modern Europe, rhetoric has been cultivated with success. But this remark applies only with any force to a period which is now long past; and it is probable, upon various considerations, that such another period will never revolve. The rhetorician's art, in its glory and pow er, has silently faded away before the stern tendencies of the age; and if, by any peculiarity of taste, or strong determination of the intellect, a rhe torician, en grand costume, were again to appear amongst us, it is certain that he would have no better welcome than a stare of surprise as a posture-maker or balancer, not more elevated in the general estimate, but far less amusing, than the opera-dancer or equestrian gymnast. No-the age of Rhetoric, like that of Chivalry, is gone, and passed amongst forgotten things; and the rhetorician can have no more chance for returning, than the rhap sodist of early Greece, or the Trouba dour of romance. So multiplied are the modes of intellectual enjoyment in modern times, that the choice is absolutely distracted; and in a boundless theatre of pleasures, to be had at little or no cost of intellectual activity, it would be marvellous indeed, if any considerable audience could be found for an exhibition which presupposes a state of tense exertion on the part both of auditor and performer. To hang upon one's own thoughts as an