The sophistic marking of balance by rime (_homœoteleuton_), easy in Greek or Latin through the recurrence of inflectional endings, is so forced in English as to be very rare and in very bad taste. Word-play, on the other hand, has always been one of the commonest devices for enhancing balance into epigram. “Figures do not lie. The trouble with statistics is not that figures lie, but that liars figure.” Paronomasia is not sophistic; but, like other jingles, it attracted the sophists too much, as to-day it attracts Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Bernard Shaw. (4) _Clausula_ Balance is only one mode of rhythm. The sophists were so preoccupied with it as often to risk monotony. For though they boasted of variety, they were too fond of certain rhythms, and too anxious to mark them, to achieve much flexibility. Their idea of aptness as conformity to an assumed character or occasion led them rather to cast a whole passage in one stylistic pattern. Next to the perfecting of balances, they studied most attentively sentence cadences.[80] Of _clausulæ_, as of other effects of style, they had a classified store for selection. Though we find it hard to follow them here, and impossible to translate their _clausulæ_ in terms of English stress rhythms, we are not warranted in dismissing their studies of rhythm as idle. True, they often overdid rhythm as they overdid technic in general; but English prose has rarely been in danger of this excess, and in particular it has been surest with those who have controlled cadence. Sentence emphasis is the clue to mastery of sentence movement. Its greater masters, modern as well as ancient, have grasped this not only as logic, but as cadence. The flaw in sophistic rhythms is their emptiness, the pursuit of them for themselves. The difference between the sounding _clausula_ of dilation and the solving _clausula_ of mounting emotion can be heard in the same English sophist. All the following sentences conclude well for the ear; but whereas the first two are prolonged by decorative additions, the last is an ascending period. The boy rose to a splendour and a noonday prosperity, both personal and public, that rang through the records of his people, and became a by-word amongst his posterity for a thousand years, until the sceptre was departing from Judah. _Joan of Arc_, 1. How if it should be some Marie Antoinette, the widowed queen, coming forward on the scaffold, and presenting to the morning air her head, turned grey by sorrow, daughter of Cæsars kneeling down humbly to kiss the guillotine, as one that worships death? _Ibid._, 26.