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

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.

NONSIDERED as an internal consciousness, the

CONSID

recog

nition 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.

6

Interrogatively -

In this God's world, with its wild whirling eddies and mad foam oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law and judgment for an unjust thing sternly delayed, dost thou think that there is therefore no justice?-Carlyle.

Emotionally, that is, in the form technically known as exclamatory

Hang it! how I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!Lamb.

For the collocation of words, every language has its peculiar usage. If inflected, there is large scope for variety in the arrangement, since verbal relations are indicated by terminal syllables. If uninflected, like modern English, the relation of words is determined by the relation of thoughts, syntax is positional, and logical analysis precedes grammatical. Hence we find here a prescribed order, according to which the subject precedes the predicate, the object follows the verb, and modifying words are placed as near as practicable to the words modified. This syntactical and customary succession is observed so long as it coincides with the usual order of thought. To express the latter suitably, however, the former is sometimes violated. Such a departure is called inversion. Whatever fixes the attention most strongly, or excites the passion of the speaker, will naturally seek utterance first. Thus we are told that the preaching of Paul at Ephesus produced a general uproar, in which the people cried without intermission, 'Great is Diana of the Ephesians!' Observe that the translators would have destroyed the signature of impetuosity by adhering to the habitual order, which is the order of a cool and temperate mood.

Sentences, whether simple, complex, or compound, obviously fall into two great classes-long and short. The first gives gravity and dignity to composition, but requires careful handling and a high degree of elaboration, that