great and unique service. He evidently depended on natural mother wit to suggest ideas to his pupils; he apparently assumed that they had learned the ordinary elements of culture at their primary schools. He trained them, so far as we know, in nothing but the careful arrangement of their materials, the smooth transition of their arguments, and the perfection of their choice and collocation of words. In this matter of style, Isocrates may be regarded as not only the greatest master that ever lived, but as the father of the periodic or oratorical style in all the languages of Europe. Demosthenes, Cicero, St. John Chrysostom, Massillon, Burke--all these immortal men have profited by the analysis of expression which, through Isocrates, first formed Greek prose, and through it the borrowed graces of those who followed Greek models. § 60. To enter into a closer description of this system would not be to discuss education, but rhetoric, and we must refer the reader to treatises on that subject. We need only here call attention to the intense _studiedness_ of Greek eloquence, and how they attained their perfection in prose--not by those violations of propriety which now please our sated taste, and which, when violent enough, as in the case of Carlyle, even pass for thoughts, and are to many the index of deep originality in something or other--but by a close and perpetual adherence to rules, often of a trivial, generally of a minute kind. It is very curious for us moderns to read the details of these things in the old rhetoricians. There is not an apparent touch of nature--a word emphatically repeated, a sudden break off, an angry burst, even a _don’t you see?_ or a _by Jove!_ or a _dear me!_--in a Greek oration which was not noted as a _figure of diction_, or a _figure of thought_, and brought under the discipline of rules. We are even told that Demosthenes composed his prose in rhythm, and avoided the use of more than two short syllables together. Isocrates certainly made the law against hiatus--against closing a word and beginning the next with vowels--a law adopted by all the prose writers of his age. Thus the formal education in rhetoric must have been no light task for the pupils of Isocrates and the other rhetors, and writing or speaking good Greek a far stricter and more difficult thing than writing English which will pass muster with the critics.