time, has hit this ἁμαρτία, this human and not disgusting “fault,” he has triumphed; wherever he has missed it, he has failed, in proportion to the breadth of his miss. With respect to the minor and verbal points of the _Poetics_ there is less to say, because there is very much less of them: [Sidenote: _The_ Rhetoric.] and what there is to say had better be said when we have considered the contents of the other great critical book, the _Rhetoric_, which may be taken as holding, if not intentionally yet actually, something of the same position towards Prose as that which the _Poetics_ holds towards verse. Before giving an analysis of this book,[44] to match that given above of the _Poetics_, a few words may properly be said to justify [Sidenote: _Meaning and range of “Rhetoric.”_] what may seen to be the rather arbitrary proceeding of, on the one hand, attaching to Rhetoric a sense avowedly somewhat different from Aristotle’s, and on the other dropping consideration of the major part of what he has actually written in it. Footnote 44: No edition with commentary can here be recommended to English readers with quite such confidence as Professor Butcher’s _Poetics_. That of E. M. Cope (3 vols., Cambridge, 1877), with a fourth, but earlier, volume of Introduction (London, 1867), is extremely full and useful, though the Germans (see Römer’s edition after Spengel, Pref., p. xxxiv) scoff at its text. Dr Welldon’s translation is well spoken of: and the old “Oxford” version, reprinted with some corrections in Bohn’s Library, is not contemptible, while Hobbes’s “Brief” (or Analysis), which accompanies it, is very valuable indeed. But here, as elsewhere, he who neglects the original neglects it at his peril. It is a mistake to force too much the bare meanings of words; but I suppose one may, without much danger of controversy, take the bare meaning of Rhetoric to be “speechcraft.” Now, it is not difficult to prove that, in Aristotle’s time, speechcraft practically included the whole of prose literature, if not the whole of literature. Poems were recited; histories were read out; the entire course of scientific and philosophic education and study went on by lecture or by dialogue. Nay, it is perhaps not fanciful to point out that the very words for reading, ἀναγιγνώσκω and ἐπιλέγομαι seem to represent it as at best a secondary and parasitic process, a “going over again” of something previously said and heard.[45] Footnote 45: Professor Butcher rather doubts this stress of mine on the prepositions, and points out to me that ἐπιλέγομαι (in the sense of reading) is almost exclusively Herodotean, and never established itself generally in Greek. But he admits that the more usual employment of ἀναγιγνώσκω for “reading _aloud_” bears on my point.