The extraordinary vogue of Geoffrey’s two thousand hexameters in itself suggests that his too is an exercise book. To suppose that it was cherished for its literary achievement is to impute to several centuries a larger and more general appetite for bombast than other evidence warrants. As school mnemonics his verses are more tolerable. As exercises in synonyms they have excuse for their redundancy. As suggestions and examples in the pursuit of figures they have more warrant for exaggeration as a means of distinctness. Caricature, which can never have been the intention of a man devoid of humor, has before Geoffrey’s time, and since, resulted from sheer overemphasis. His own incessant word-play is so anxious as to verge sometimes on _reductio ad absurdum_. Or were some of these tirades made to order by his students? May they be such progressively revised composite themes as the earlier schools assigned in similar hexameter tasks?[13] At any rate, a probable explanation of the portentous style, as well as a charitable one, is that the _Poetria nova_ was a museum for boys. After bowing to the ancient _inventio_ and _dispositio_, neither of which is in point and neither handled as a process of composing, Geoffrey devotes most of his book to the rhetorical means of dilation. This is the aim of the _colores_, not only of verbal expansions in general, but in particular of two sorts of deliberate interpolation: apostrophe and description. To go farther afield, let apostrophe be the fourth means of lingering by which you may detain the subject. Seventh comes description, pregnant with words, to dilate the work.[14] Chaucer,[15] whose ironical homage has made Geoffrey a laughing-stock, was exploding the use of these figures in verse narrative. In oratory also of a certain sort he exhibits their deviation in the specimen preaching of the Pardoner because they are perennial in sophistic. Geoffrey’s description is precisely the ecphrasis cultivated throughout the Empire in _declamatio_.[16] In a word, Geoffrey’s poetic, as Alain’s, Vincent’s, Brunetto Latini’s,[17] is mainly the rhetoric of dilation. The sophistic of the ancient encomium, walking the schools once more, is now called Poetria. 3. Évrard, _Laborintus_ (c. 1213)