Aiming at the easiest transitions within the period, it is careful to distinguish between periods. The parts coalesce; the units stand out.[53] This is in line with the doctrine of Aristotle,[54] and is admirably exemplified by the practise of Cicero. Dionysius’s instances are Sappho and Isocrates. The third, or blended mode[55] Dionysius labors in vain to distinguish from the other two. Ingenious as are his analyses of the three modes, even sometimes suggestive, they fail to establish the reality of the classification. We can discern in the distinction between his first two a carrying out—perhaps an undue extension—of Aristotle’s distinction between the unperiodic style and the periodic.[56] His third mode seems to be not a mode at all, but merely a reminder that neither of the other two can be used exclusively or pushed to excess. As to the distinction of prose rhythms from verse[57] Dionysius quotes with approval Aristotle’s dictum[58] that prose should be rhythmical without becoming metrical. It seems plain none the less that his own taste is for rather marked rhythms even in prose, and that he would encourage students to go a long way toward meter. Before he closes his book upon this consideration, he raises quite frankly the question of how far its analyses have practical value. I have a presentiment that an onslaught will be made on these statements by people who are destitute of general culture and practise the mechanical parts of rhetoric unmethodically and unscientifically.... Their argument will doubtless be: “Was Demosthenes, then, so poor a creature that, whenever he was writing his speeches, he would work in meters and rhythms after the fashion of clay-modellers, and would try to fit his clauses into these moulds, shifting the words to and fro, keeping an anxious eye on his longs and shorts, and fretting himself about cases of nouns, moods of verbs, and all the accidents of the parts of speech? So great a man would be a fool indeed were he to stoop to all this niggling and peddling.” If they scoff and jeer in these or similar terms, they may easily be countered by the following reply: “First, it is not surprising after all that a man who is held to deserve a greater reputation than any of his predecessors who were distinguished for eloquence was anxious, when composing eternal works and submitting himself to the scrutiny of all-testing envy and time, not to admit either subject or words at random, and to attend carefully to both arrangements of ideas and beauty of words: particularly as the authors of that day were producing discourses which suggested not writing, but carving and chasing—those I mean of the sophists Isocrates and Plato.... What wonder, then, if Demosthenes also was careful to secure euphony and melody and to employ no random or untested word or thought?”[59]