In prose the same complete examination was only given, and, in the special conditions so often referred to, could only have been given, to one, and that the least important of all the divisions of prose literature—to Oratory. Oratory is, after all, the prose literature of the savage. It is in no degree a contradiction to this that it should have reached its highest pitches at periods which were not at all savage—in the palmy days of Athens, in the agony of the Republic at Rome, in the England of the eighteenth century—for it is scarcely necessary to take into account the one period of modern times when savagery ruled once more supreme, the French Revolution, though Oratory certainly did then share the shameful throne. This confirms the doctrine just laid down _simpliciter_, the others confirm it indirectly. In the great age of Greece savagery was passing; but the efforts of civilisation were directed to making perfect what the savage ages had regarded as most important. The whole condition of Roman life tended to support oratory. And in eighteenth-century England it so happened that poetry was in abeyance; prose fiction was making its way half in the dark; history was but just rising and philosophy, though still much cultivated, had not got out of the strangling grasp of Locke. Even if these propositions be disputable, the fact of the predominance of oratory in Greece is not, nor is the thoroughness (surpassing even that of the treatment of tragedy) which was accorded to its study. Inadequate, however, as was the treatment of prose kinds in general by the Greeks, even with such examples before them as Plato and Thucydides and Herodotus, they _did_ treat them: and their treatment of the main critical aspects of prose was, if not always well directed, even more searching and thorough than their treatment of verse. They did not neglect rhythm as it was neglected, with rare exceptions, by all modern criticism till recently. They bestowed upon prose diction much of the sometimes to us not fully intelligible, but constantly fruitful, care which they had also bestowed on the diction of poetry. They hit at once on the great fundamental principle—that while ordinary language breeds clearness, language of an unfamiliar character (from whatever source that unfamiliarity may be derived) breeds the power of _striking_—which again not all modern critics, nor even the majority of modern critics, seem to have been able to grasp. And then they hit upon the Figures.