After the prepositional phrase, the most important phrasal combination to examine, from the standpoint of rhetorical usages, is the participial phrase. We could infer this truth from the fact alone that the Greeks made a very extensive use of the participle, as every student of that marvellous language knows. Greek will frequently use a participle where English employs a dependent clause or even a full sentence, so that the English expression “the man who is carrying a spear” would be in Greek “the spear carrying man”; “the one who spoke” would be “the one having spoken” and further accordingly, with even more economy of language than these examples indicate. I am disposed to think that the Greeks developed this habit because they were very quick to see opportunities of subordination. The clarity and subtlety of the Greek language derives in no small part from this highly “organized” character, in which auxiliary thoughts are compactly placed in auxiliary structures, where they permit the central thought to emerge more readily. In English the auxiliary status of the participle (recognized formally through its classification as an adjective) is not always used to like advantage. One consequence of this is that although English intonation and normal word order tend to make the last part of a sentence the most emphatic, unskillful writers sometimes lose this emphasis by concluding a sentence with a participial phrase. We may take as examples “He returned home in September, having been gone for a year”; and “Having been gone for a year, he returned home in September.” The second of these puts the weightier construction in the emphatic position. Of course the matter of their relative merit cannot be separated from their purpose; there are sentences whose total meanings are best served by a _retardo_ or _diminuendo_ effect at the end, and for such closes the participial phrase is well suited for reasons already given. But in the majority of utterances it contributes best by modifying at some internal position, or by expressing some detail or some condition at the beginning of the sentence. The latter use may be quite effective in climactic orderings, and it will be found that journalists have virtually stereotyped this opening for their “lead” sentences: “Threatened with an exhausted food supply by the strike, hospitals today made special arrangements for the delivery of essentials”; “Reaching a new high for seven weeks, the stock market yesterday pushed into new territory.” This form is a successful if often crude result of effort toward compact and dramatic presentation.