Not only did the prevalence of rhetoric make poetic generally subsidiary, but the prevalence of _declamatio_[15] in later teaching and practise tended actually to confuse the two. This rhetoric was itself largely poetic, largely an art of appeal by description. Sometimes carrying descriptive dialogue into a sort of oral fiction, it had no occasion for poetic movement. The pattern of a speech sufficed as well as another where the opportunity was less of the whole than of the parts.[16] Immediate popular oral effects were then, as now, gained rather by stinging epigrams and dramatic realizations than by any onward course. The poetic that shall win a crowd on the spot is more likely than the poetic that shall be savored by individual readers to be sensational. Sensational in fact it was commonly, to judge by examples ranging all the way from Seneca’s _Controversiæ_ well into the Christian centuries. Even those rhetors who were not sensational in their own practise were little more likely, in a time of such preoccupations, to conceive poetic distinctively; and rhetors purveyed, among other things, literary criticism. Besides teaching and exhibiting at home, the more popular rhetors traveled as occasional orators and lecturers. Though their speeches were oftenest, of course, occasional, and, when they were rather lectures, were commonly in the fields of philosophy and ethics, still professional public speakers must have purveyed, at home and on their journeys, a good deal of the current literary criticism. Where this was incidental, it need not be taken too seriously. No device of public speaking is more persistent than the flattering of an audience by literary allusions and accepted adjectives of admiration.[17] Such passages, in ancient speeches or in modern, show merely what is regarded as the right thing to say, and are almost always limited to style. But where a rhetor develops a literary topic, even for a paragraph or two, he may be as significant as any other literary critic. The particular rhetor might be a teacher of rhetoric primarily, or secondarily, or hardly at all. Though he hardly ranked as a philosopher,[18] yet he was an active purveyor of philosophy. An expert in public address, he professed a variety of considerable range. Occasional oratory of itself invites ranging in both emotion and thought. Conventional as he appears when considered merely as one of a numerous class, he might nevertheless be an outstanding individual; and even as a type he was at least accomplished and influential.