The mythical zoölogy is now often too diverting to keep its effectiveness as illustration. But to recover this, and to realize that the bestiaries do not convict the middle age of credulity, we need not go back of St. Francis de Sales. _Exempla_, after all, are a commonplace of preaching because they are a necessity. The general thesaurus and the special[19] alike confirm the impression of wide use of a common fund of topics and illustrations. But sermon helps are not peculiar to the middle age. Every age has offered to its preachers something equivalent to the medieval handy manuals.[20] Not only preaching, but all occasional oratory, has always been beset by the temptation to rely on pattern and stock.[21] That the middle age had many conventional sermons is less significant than that it had St. Bernard and the early Dominicans. C. MANUALS Medieval manuals of preaching are no more specific than modern manuals as to their rhetoric. That is typically generalized, or even taken for granted. For instance, Guibert de Nogent’s _Liber quo ordine sermo fieri debeat_,[22] concerned entirely with interpretation, has no rhetoric at all. The anonymous Chartres work on popular preaching quoted in part by Clerval[23] gives, besides the usual procedure and advice, a practical counsel for preparation and one for delivery. The first is to fix meditation on the specific object of that sermon and on the specific means most likely to bring it home, not on the words. The words will come if the matter is surely ordered. The second is to increase urgency from quotations of texts through _exempla_ uttered with loud appeal until the congregation shows emotional response, then to moderate the tone so as to lead quietly to the final benediction. Another anonymous manual[24] sets forth eight methods of expansion (_De dilatatione sermonum_): (1) definition and exposition of terms, especially of their “moral” significance; (2) division, not to be so minute in a sermon as in a treatise; (3) proof, by contraries, enthymemes, examples, again to be guarded from subtlety; (4) citation of confirmatory texts; (5) degrees, i.e., positive-comparative-superlative, as in exhibiting one of the virtues; (6) metaphors, not to be multiplied nor mixed; (7) symbolism, i.e., allegory, tropology, anagogy; (8) cause and effect. Most of these are commonplaces of rhetoric. Some of them, and their use for dilation, suggest the same preoccupations as the _poetriæ_.[25]