Inquiry into the sources and means of persuasion (our author admits graciously, but with a touch of superiority which, [Sidenote: _Attitude to_ lexis.] as we shall see, accentuates itself later) does not quite exhaust Rhetoric. It must also discuss style and arrangement. But style is a modern thing, and, rightly considered, something _ad captandum_.[46] Indeed Aristotle never seems to keep it quite clear from mere elocution or delivery—from the art of the actor as contradistinguished from that of the writer. He remarks that he has dealt with style fully in his _Poetics_; and as he has certainly not done so in the _Poetics_ which we have, this is an argument that they are incomplete, though by no means that they are spurious. But it is almost impossible to mistake the touch of patronage, not to say of scorn, with which he deals with it here, and we need not doubt that, if we had the other handling to which he refers, something of the same sort would appear there. The fact is, that the Greeks of this period were what we may call High-fliers; anything that had the appearance of being “mechanical,” anything that seemed to subject the things of the spirit to something not wholly of the spirit, they regarded with suspicion and impatience, which rather suggests the objection of some theologians to good works. Words, like colours, materials of sculpture and architecture, and the like, were “filthy rags”; and if Aristotle’s common-sense carried him a little less far in this direction than his master Plato’s philosophical enthusiasm, it certainly carried him some way. Footnote 46: Τὸ περὶ τὴν λέξιν ὀψὲ προῆλθεν· καὶ δοκεῖ φορτικὸν εἶναι, καλῶς ὑπολαμβανόμενον. See note at end of chapter.