The pedantic subdivision of these manuals shows that their aim was not to organize the study of poetic, but to cover its elements by as many exercises as possible. Imitative writing of Latin verse, long part of the study of _grammatica_, has been combined with the theory of _rhetorica_ through exercises in figures, and with its practise through exercises in _dictamen_. Doubtless the resulting aggregation was called _poetria_ both because the exercises were still connected with the traditional _prælectio_ and were oftenest in verse, and because, whether in verse or in _dictamen_, they were focused on that heightening by ornament and by dilation which was conventionally regarded as poetic. _Poetria_, then, meant generally the study of style, and specifically the study of stylistic decoration. The lore for this was rhetoric,[42] partly indeed by misapplication, partly from the vagueness of the boundary in Latin tradition. The “colors of rhetoric,” not always clearly distinguished, sometimes strangely spelled, were faithfully recited as a sort of Greek ritual of poetic. The confusion went to its bitter end in that stock perversion by which Vergil’s poetic was broken on the wheel into three pieces of rhetoric. The vital difference between rhetoric and poetic in composition, probably beyond the ken of these writers, was certainly beyond the intention of these manuals. Composition for them goes no further than the adjustment of a sentence. The ancient _inventio_ and _dispositio_, sometimes dragged in by misapplication, are generally ignored. The distinction of “natural” from “artificial” order provides a pattern, not to promote composition, but to obviate its necessity. So the “methods of beginning” are presented as verbal devices. The scope of these manuals suggests that rhetoric, whether in its own name or as _poetria_, did not teach composition. What had once been part of rhetoric was now left to logic and the debates of the schools. As for poetic composition, the active progress of vernacular verse narrative would hardly be represented in a schoolbook. What is represented, what appears alike in school Latin and in professional vernacular,[43] is surviving conventional pattern, the passive voice of poetic, not its active. Marie had found another poetic. Chrétien, though he had accepted some of the same conventions of style, had learned otherwise what he knew of narrative movement. Even Latin narrative had been otherwise studied by Walter Map. To poetic in this larger composing activity the _poetria_ of the schools offers no clue. At the turn of the next century Dante, who knew all its poetic conventions, ignored them in a supreme composition; and within that century Chaucer, who knew them too, laughed them away. C. HYMNS 1. Progress of Rimed Stress Verse