Ancient theory being eminent in a few cardinal texts long recognized as representative, the former volume subordinates history to exposition. Medieval theory, on the other hand, being best grasped as development from an inheritance, the plan of the present volume is historical. Though each aims at sufficiency within itself, the second refers again and again to the first, and the two volumes together offer a history down to 1400. Throughout this history rhetoric and poetic are seen to be indeed complementary. Where they were distinguished, as where they were confused, they are most fruitfully studied side by side. Each illuminates the other because their relations are always significant historically. Their medieval history must begin with those particular influences from antiquity which were transmitted through the last schools of the Roman Empire, especially through the schools of Gaul. It is a Latin history; for contact with Greek was soon lost and was not widely reëstablished till the Renaissance. But in the imperial centuries before the separation East and West, Greek and Latin, agreed so far in literary ideals and practise that the whole Mediterranean basin had a substantially common system of education through rhetoric. An inert survival of what is known historically as the second sophistic, this was sharply challenged by St. Augustine’s reversion through Cicero to the elder tradition for authority to direct the real oratory of preaching. Nevertheless the schools of Gaul continued the sophistic tradition beyond the fall of Rome.