The order[55] of the diction must be neither metrical nor unrhythmical. The former, by seeming artificial, is unpersuasive and at the same time distracting. For it makes us think of recurrences and wait for them to come, as children anticipate the answer to the heralds’ “Whom does the freedman choose as his attorney? Cleon.” On the other hand, the unrhythmical is immeasurable, and a measure we must have, though not by metrical recurrence; for the boundless can be grasped neither by the ear nor by the mind. Now measure in the most general sense is number;[56] and number as applied to the order of the diction is rhythm, of which meters are sections. Rhythm, therefore, the speech must have, but not meter, or it will be a poem—rhythm not too nice, that is, not carried too far. Of the three rhythms the heroic is solemn and lacking in prose harmony.[57] The iambic is the very diction of the crowd; i.e., it is heard oftener than any other measure in speech, and it lacks capacity to lift and startle. The trochaic[58] is too suggestive of comic dancing, as is evident in trochaic tetrameters, which are a skipping rhythm. There remains the pæan. Having laid down the principle that prose movement should be rhythmical, but not metrical, why does Aristotle proceed immediately to discuss it in terms of meters? Simply, perhaps, because these terms are familiar and definite. How else, indeed, shall we speak of a particular movement specifically? Perhaps also because the consideration of the larger, freer rhythms of prose is best opened through the fixed rhythms of verse, i.e., because meter is the gateway to appreciation of rhythm, as poetry in a wider sense (see page 24) is the gateway to style in a wider sense. For us moderns it is the more significant that the classical doctrine of clauses and sentences deals so largely with rhythm, since our doctrine throws the emphasis on logic. That the σύνθεσις, or _compositio_, should be idiomatic, dignified, appropriate, Aristotle has urged briefly; that it should be rhythmical he proceeds to set forth in detail, consecutively showing how.[59] Thus that the diction should be rhythmical, not unrhythmical, what rhythms make it rhythmical, and in what modes, has been set forth.