CHAP.

I.

Aristotle's success in this art.

But it is idle to arraign writers, whom you may refute, but do not silence; whom you may stab in the vitals, but do not kill. For, month after month, or quarter after quarter, they revive periodically; enter the lists afresh, after all their errors have been exposed, all their sophisms detected, all their predictions falsified; and while their buffoonery, in the mask of erudition, amuses idleness or delights malice, they will preserve their influence, unimpaired, over readers of scanty education and lazy habits, of light minds. and vicious characters.

When errors reach a certain height, they have a tendency to correct themselves; and their removal is said to be the work of time. But mere length of time is an inefficacious reformer. By time, on the contrary, all institutions will contract rust; and into the best of them, in the course of time, corruption will enter, merely through the love of change, and the fastidious preference of novelty to excellence. They ought all of them, therefore, in the words of a great and much injured author, to be seasonably brought back to their first principles.

With this view, I have exerted my best endeavour to familiarize the modern reader with the most approved, and also the most ancient treatise extant, professing to explain, on correct philosophical principles, the merits and demerits of literary composition; to investigate the rules of taste, and establish the canons of criticism. This

This epithet is justified by my observations on the works of Machiavel, in various parts of " Aristotle's Politics."

I.

treatise is degraded by the name of "Rhetoric," CHA P. in the present acceptation of that word. Taken in conjunction with the works of more exact science to which the author perpetually refers, the "Rhetoric of Aristotle" comprises, within a narrow compass, the absolute and unalterable principles of good tastes, the foundations of all correct moral reasoning, and, humanly speaking, the maxims of all sound practical wisdom. Here, especially, the Stagyrite is exercised, in a field which the condition of his times afforded advantages for cultivating, that were never united in any other: the agitations of many free states in the near neighbourhood of each other; the ardent and illustrious competitions in tribunals and public assemblies; the unrivalled elegance of national solemnities; and those high literary attainments, approved in all ages, themselves worthy of approbation, and never vilified by any but those ignorant and conceited persons, whose envious and feeble eyes were unable to endure their splendour. Such were the advantages of which Aristotle fully availed himself, in writing his treatise on prosaic composition; for he had before written his art of poetry, whose golden fragments have been translated and commented by some of the first names in modern literature. But his Rhetoric is not, like the Poetic, a fragment: it is a complete work, ample in detail, and strict in method, and comprised wholly in the three

Though tastes be variable to a proverb, good taste is ever and every where the same. How few ages have been adorned by it! But in these few the glory of the human species is concentrated.

CHAP. books, inscribed to Theodectes, which are here translated.

I.

Analysis of the Rhetoric to

tes.

The Rhetoric inscribed to Alexander was written by Anaximenes, of Lampsacus: it has little of Aristotle's depth or precision, and was edited in the body of his ample but ill-digested remains, to supply the place of his lost treatise that bore the same title: every thing of value in it is contained in the Rhetoric to Theodectes.

Of this inestimable work, the greater part turns on the three kinds of oratory first disTheodec- tinguished in Athens, but which retain, and must ever retain, their distinct place and character in all free states, indeed in all civilized countries. These are the deliberative and the judicial, words which sufficiently explain themselves; and that called demonstrative, because principally intended for demonstration or show, the display of high intellectual powers, the exhibition of generous and lofty sentiments.

The business of all oratory is to instruct or to persuade; but each of the three kinds has its distinct office and its peculiar end. The deliberative is employed in exhorting to certain measures, or in restraining from them; the judicial in accusation or defence; the demonstrative in praise or blame. Of the deliberative, the end is utility; it bears a reference to the present: of the judicial, the end is justice; it bears a reference to things past: of the demonstrative, which has not any appropriate time, the end is honour and glory. Each kind

6 Quintilian, Inst. Orator. 1. iii. c. 4. Dionys. Halicarn. Epist. ad Ammæum. Compare History of Ancient Greece, p. ii. c. ix.

I.

of oratory is considered by Aristotle apart, and CHAP. its rules are explained under the separate heads of thought, diction, and arrangement, or method; an explanation equally evincing the vast reach of his invention, and the unerring solidity of his judgment. Boileau, himself so much distinguished by this faculty, that a cautious distributor of praise says emphatically", that "Boileau "will seldom be found mistaken," declares that he had learned more from Aristotle's Rhetoric, than from all the other books he had ever read in his life. This eulogy is hyperbolical, but expressive of that deep sense of gratitude, in which Horace, the precursor and the model of Boileau, would heartily have joined; for none ever turned the Rhetoric to better account than Horace, in his Satires, Epistles, and especially in his Art of Poetry.

quence.

In treating the subject of deliberative elo- Deliberaquence, Aristotle takes an extensive view of the tive elowide variety of discussions occupying senates and assemblies. He does not consider a commonwealth as a machine ingeniously contrived for multiplying riches; much less as a mere engine of war.

He contemplates national prosperity under every possible aspect; divides it into its in. tegral parts; resolves these parts into their constituent elements, and from this complete analysis deduces those topics of argument which may be successfully employed in every subject of political debate.

'Johnson, in his Life of Dryden.

"Pour moi J'avoue franchement que sa lecture m'a plus profité' que tout ce que j'ai jamais lû en ma vie.

CHAP.

I.

Judicial eloquence.

Demon

strative eloquence

history.

The same process he pursues in treating the eloquence of the bar, whose end is justice. This bulwark of social life he examines and decomposes with singular perspicuity; distinguishing natural justice from that depending on positive institution, and from both of them, equity, the corrective of justice, which looks with an eye of compassion on human frailty, duly discriminating between errors and accidents on one hand, and errors and crimes on the other: errors that are committed without any pravity of purpose, and crimes that originate in willing villany; to which latter class, Aristotle refers the gratification of all inordinate and odious passions. He then explains the difference between public and private delinquency; and observes that in both, it is indispensable that terms should be clearly defined, in order to understand precisely what constitutes theft, murder, adultery, sacrilege, and treason; for in all crimes, the intention of the mind is the main point, not the external act: since the intention constitutes the whole turpitude of the transgression,andmusttherefore be always implied in the term by which the crime is denoted. Upon these and similar distinctions, containing the germ and more than the germ of the highest perfection to which jurisprudence ever can be carried, Aristotle builds the art of inventing those topics and arguments by which advocates may plead persuasively, and omit nothing calculated to prove that they have justice on their side.

Demonstrative eloquence may be supposed, in modern times, to have ceased. Whether destined to entertainment merely, or to entertainment