(xxxxix) The fifth of the elements that combine to give height is _compositio_. Having already in two other treatises gone exhaustively into the theory of _compositio_, I will treat it here only in general. The pervasive emotional effect of rhythm need only be insisted on; it is too evident to require proof. (xl) That it is separately distinguishable as a cause of heightening can be seen in many authors, most strikingly in Euripides, who is a poet rather of _compositio_ than of thought. (xli-xlii) Conversely, a wrong rhythm may drag down or distract, (xliii) as may also a descriptive detail that interrupts or jars. _That orators rarely attain the heights of style means that they live unworthily._ (xliv) Why have we now few authors that reach the heights? Is the cause political, the decay of democracy? Rather it is moral; it is our materialism. Compared with the orderly _a priori_ progress of Dionysius, this treatment seems at once less systematic; and though the manuscripts show gaps, some apparently of considerable length, we have enough of the treatise to conclude that the whole was rather suggestive than logically divided and consecutive. But through it all runs the controlling idea that the higher reaches of style are, in cause and in effect, imaginative. Discussing oratory, the author is all the while drawing instances from poetry; and this means more than in the treatise of Dionysius. The scope is larger. Not only does he range far beyond _compositio_, which occupies only five of his chapters; he is looking in general less to technic and more to motive. What lifts the orator, and makes him lift his hearers, is first intellectual power of conception, then emotional power of sympathy. These are the springs. They work out in imaginative diction and rhythmical pace; but that few orators lift us by these means is due fundamentally to a general lack of idealism. The contribution, then, of this unknown critic consists in illuminating the bearing of poetic on rhetoric, the importance of imaginative realization even for purposes of persuasion. The distinction between rhetoric and poetic he never blurs; in fact he contrasts the two explicitly; but he brings out, more clearly than any other ancient author, their interdependence. First, he precludes any undue separation of thought from emotion by making conception, in Homer as well as in Demosthenes, intellectual. His word νόησις reminds one that Aristotle conversely brings rhetoric into poetic by making thought, διάνοια,[2] one of the elements of tragedy. Then further he shows throughout that style at its height, in Demosthenes as well as in Homer, is imaginative realization, that where we feel ὕψος, _sublimitas_, even in the field of rhetoric, we find the typical language of poetic. Such passages, he says in his first chapter, do not merely persuade us; they carry us out of ourselves.