The ancient experience with rhetoric and with poetic is seen in retrospect as typical. The theory of rhetoric as the energizing of knowledge and the humanizing of truth is explicitly the philosophy of Aristotle and implicitly that of Cicero, Tacitus, Quintilian. What the later ancient professors of rhetoric had rather in mind is the training of immediate personal effectiveness; and this theory of rhetoric as the art of the speaker is at once as old as the other and as permanent. Its name is sophistic. Aristotle deprecated it in his first chapter; St. Augustine turned his back on it at the end of the ancient world; but meantime it had been for centuries, and it has been again and again, a popular pedagogy. Further discussion of these traditions, and of such details as the persistence of classical metric after the beat of more popular stress rhythms had become insistent, is properly historical. Historical interpretation of the ancient lore of composition and of its influence in the middle ages is relegated to another volume. The expository task of this one concludes naturally with the completion of the ancient experience. FOOT-NOTES: [1] See D. L. Clark, _Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance_, New York, 1922 (Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Literature). [2] So, e.g., does Petronius, _Satyricon_, 118. [3] See above, page 80. [4] See above, Chapter V. B. [5] Section C. 1, below. [6] To what has already appeared from the preceding chapters may be added the opinion of George Converse Fiske: “from the Hellenistic period on, and throughout the Roman world of letters, the study of rhetoric was a prerequisite for literary composition in every field.” _The Plain Style in the Scipionic Circle_, page 62 (University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, number 3, 1919). [7] See above, page 68. [8] See above, pages 56, 57. [9] See above, page 102. What Alfred Croiset says of him seems true rather of the habit of his time: “questions arrêtées d’avance et toujours les mêmes; c’est dresser son signalement suivant un formulaire, qu’il s’agit simplement de remplir.” _Hist. de la litt. grecque_, V. 368. [10] Nettleship, _Literary Criticism in Latin Antiquity_ (Lectures and Essays, Second Series). [11] See above, page 63. [12] See the scornful comment of Croiset, V. 358. [13] Nettleship, _Lectures and Essays_, I. 176 (on Horace’s _Ars Poetica_). [14] See Nettleship, op. cit., 248. Saintsbury, _Loci Critici_, 74, quotes his _Noctes Atticæ_ xvii. 10, on Vergil’s _Æneid_, III. 570. [15] See pages 68-73, 94-97. [16] See foot-note 50 to Chapter IV, foot-note 70 to Chapter VII. [17] See the quotations from Apuleius in the preceding section.