“Order [means] everything in its place; but this order is in two manners, one which is natural and another artificial.... The artificial order is divided into eight manners”: (1) to say at the beginning what was at the end, (2) to begin with what was in the middle, (3) to base your story on the beginning of a proverb, (4) to base it on the middle of the proverb, (5) to base it on the end of the proverb, (6) (7) (8) so for three uses of an example. 482. The mechanical division reflects a wide abeyance in theory, not only of poetic shaping and movement, but even of the _dispositio_ of ancient rhetoric; for its real concern is not with composition at all, whether in prose or in verse, but with the phrasing of certain patterns. Brunetto’s preoccupation with style, and with style mainly as decorative dilation, soon appears in “how to dilate one’s tale in eight ways ... which are called colors of rhetoric.”[65] Among these _colores_, under _demonstrance_ (_demonstratio_), is his celebrated, but entirely conventional, ecphrasis on Yseult. The traditional parts of a speech (exordium, etc.) are used[66] as an approach to _dictamen_, of which Brunetto appears to be thinking through much of what follows. The concluding chapters on statecraft are far from a discussion of politics. Rather they set forth the conduct of a seigneur. Thus they fail to carry out the relations of rhetoric to government which in his opening he borrows from Cicero. Book III, then, of the _Trésor_ lapses further and further from the ancient conception of rhetoric with which it begins. The rhetoric which it actually presents, and which it applies to poetry as well as to _dictamen_,[67] is a meager, though pleasant, review of style.[68] What rhetoric appears in these surveys to lack most is distinct function. Writers as different as John of Salisbury and Brunetto Latini seem to think of it as polishing, decorating, especially dilating, what has been already expressed. It comes in after the real job is done; it has lost its ancient function of composing. The ancient lore of _inventio_ kept rhetoric in contact with subject matter and with actual presentation. This had so much less scope in feudal society that the lore easily lapsed, or was perverted. The only large field for its exercise was preaching. Education, therefore, naturally threw its weight on _grammatica_ for boys, on _dialectica_ for men. Between the two rhetoric was crowded into narrow room. Whether it would still have vindicated itself if it had been the rhetoric of Aristotle, or oftener the rhetoric of Quintilian, can be only conjectured. Actually it was the rhetoric of _De inventione_ and _ad Herennium_, and inculcated the sophistic of Sidonius. That may explain why there was no medieval rhetorician who really advanced the study. FOOTNOTES: