RHETORIC

(Gr. firjropiKn. sc. tc\vh, the, rhetorical art; from pt^riop. art orator.) In the widest sense in which the word is occasionally used by modern writers, the art of prose Composition generally. In the most restricted and most etymological sense, the art of oratory, or of adlog public a emblies. In an intermediate sense, in which, perhaps, it is most commonly employed, the art of argumentative composition. This comes nearest to the lication which Aristotle, the earliest extant writer of a formal treatise on rhetoric, attached to the title of his I t, when he defined it to be the art of discovering and employing topics of persuasion. He arranged these topics or means of persuasion under three beads. First, those which arise from the character of the orator himself;i.e„ the character in which, by what must be termed rhetorical artifice, he places himself before his hearers. It is obvious that a speaker addre ing an a embly, u ho is known by them to be actuated by honest motives, and to understand the subject on which he speaks, advances by tin; mere po e ion of these adventitious attributes a long way towards the end and aim of or 'lory, viz., peril. Hence it is that Aristotle presents, as one of the chief branches of rhetoric, the art liy which the speaker jar writer, as it were, invests himself with these attributes, and thus ensures a more favourable reception to his argument. The art of moving the pa ions by the use of such arguments and representations as are proper to excite each, belongs also, in Aristotle's arrangement, to this division of abject. In his second division he treats of argument itself, considered with respect to its cogency or inconclute in point of form; and hence logic, in this point of view, becomes ancillary to, or a subdivision of, rhetoric. The third division of the subject exhibits the modes of I ision arising from style, arrangement, delivery, and action; and to this third branch writers, who have treated of rhetoric in its more limited sense, have usually confined themselves. As the work of Aristotle is the first, so it is the only a ttic treatise on rhetoric which the ancients have left us, among whom the art was much more diligently cultivated than among the moderns. Public speaking was of infinitely greater importance in the cla ical commonwealths than in any modern state; even in our own, where most sedulously studied and most valued, it is but a subsidiary accomplishment. The true momentum of decision, that which convinces or di uades, lies in the ELOQUBSCK. [s. 1073]