Where has been more nobly expressed the mainspring of interest in literature? Great authors satisfy our longing to enter the human scene fully, to experience vicariously and to share in imagination passions and deeds greater than those of our every day. They touch the heights of style who know the heights of life. To bring oratory into this company is at once to claim for it literary height and to insist on the relation of rhetoric to morality. The moral implications of rhetoric are stressed again in the last chapter (xliv) that remains. Aristotle had recognized them explicitly. St. Augustine, at the end of the ancient world, must reaffirm them for Christian preaching. But against the sophistic that had always threatened this ideal no antidote is more effective than the great unknown’s sense of mission. Aristotle’s theory of rhetoric determines its function. Cicero dignifies even its conventional tasks as training for leadership. Quintilian surveys it as a comprehensive pedagogy. Dionysius analyzes its art. But the great unknown moves us to share that art ourselves. FOOT-NOTES: [1] The edition of W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge, 1899; second edition, 1907), bearing this traditional title, has, besides text and translation, an introduction on the authorship, contents, and character, and several valuable appendices: A. textual; B. linguistic (beginning this scholar’s collation of Greek rhetorical terms); C. literary (with a table of contents and a list of quotations located and arranged alphabetically by authors); D. bibliographical. Other modern English translations are: by H. L. Havell, with an introduction by Andrew Lang (London, 1890; reprinted by Lane Cooper in _Theories of Style_, New York, 1907); by A. O. Prickard, with a brief introductory essay on the authorship and character, a digest by chapters, and four appendices: I. Specimen Passages Translated from Greek Writers of the Roman Empire on Literary Criticism; II. The Treatise on Sublimity and Latin Critics; III. Passages Translated from Bishop Lowth’s Oxford Lectures on Hebrew Poetry; IV. Additional Note on Paraphones. [2] _Poetic_, 1450 a. [3] x. [4] xi, at the end. The ἐκεῖνο of this parenthesis in xi refers to x. [5] xii. A similar comparison is made by Quintilian, X. i. 106. [6] In English the familiar contrast is between Shakspere’s figures and Bacon’s. [7] xv. [8] xv. [9] The bearing of delivery on this, of the art of the actor on the art of the orator, is glanced at in the opening chapter of Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_, Book III (see above, page 24), a meager passage illumined by this doctrine of the Great Unknown. [10] Aristotle, _Rhetoric_, III. xii. 1414 a. See the discussion of this passage above, page 33. [11] See the bibliography in the edition of Rhys Roberts.