We see from its very opening words that the great distinctions between verse and prose literature on the one hand, and between literary and non-literary composition on the other, had been already hit upon. Prose style, says he, must be neither _emmetron_ nor _arrhythmon_—that is to say, it must not have metre nor lack rhythm. But he does not very accurately define the difference between these things; and it cannot be said that any of his commentators and successors have supplied this defect, though it is easy enough to do so.[48] He, however, allows feet if not metre in prose, and proceeds to inquire what feet will do, making observations on the subject which are in the three degrees of obscurity to all who are not fond of guessing. Dactylic, iambic, and trochaic rhythms are dismissed for various reasons, rather bad than good—it not having apparently struck the critic that all these arrange themselves too _easily_, certainly, and definitely into metre. He pitches finally on the pæan, a foot which, though admissible in those Greek choric measures which are a sort of compromise between prose and poetry, at once reveals its suitableness for prose in modern languages by the fact that it is unsuitable for modern verse. The pæan or pæon is a tetrasyllabic foot, consisting of three short syllables and a long one, of which in strictness there may be four varieties, the long syllable being admissible in any of the four places. But Aristotle only admits two, with the long syllable in the first and fourth place respectively. And here, most tantalisingly, he breaks off. Footnote 48: Metre being neither more nor less than definitely _recurrent_ rhythm, first within the line, then in corresponding lines. The distinction between loose and periodic style,[49] which the modern composition-books have run so tiresomely to death, [Sidenote: _Loose and periodic style, &c._] and which is really a very unimportant technical detail, follows; and then we return to those Delilahs of the ancient rhetorician, Figures—Metaphor once more, Antithesis, Personification, Hyperbole, &c. Yet even this is more to our purpose than the demonstration that follows, showing that each kind of Rhetoric, judicial, deliberative, and declamatory, should have its particular style. And with this the handling of _lexis_ proper closes, the rather brief remainder of the book being devoted partly to _taxis_ (_ordonnance_, as Dryden would say), but with special reference to the needs of the pleader, and partly to a fresh handling of the old questions of enthymeme, the dispositions of the audience, and the like. Footnote 49: In the Greek εἰρομένη, “strung together,” and κατεστραμμένη, “inter-twisted.”