The second is perhaps only a special case of the first. Julius Pollux, a sophist whom Lucian is supposed to have attacked in _The Rhetorician's Vade mecum_, is best known as author of an _Onomasticon_, or word-list, containing the most important words relating to certain subjects. One would be reluctant to believe that Lucian condescended to use his enemy's manual; but it is hard to think that he had not one of his own, of which he made much too good use. The conviction is constantly forced on a translator that when Lucian has said a thing sufficiently once, he has looked at his Onomasticon, found that there are some words he has not yet got in, and forthwith said the thing again with some of them, and yet again with the rest. The third concerns his use of illustrative anecdotes, comparisons, and phrases. It is true that, if his pieces are taken each separately, he is most happy with all these (though it is hard to forgive Alexander's bathe in the Cydnus with which _The Hall_ opens); but when they are read continuously, the repeated appearances of the tragic actor disrobed, the dancing apes and their nuts, of Zeus's golden cord, and of the 'two octaves apart,' produce an impression of poverty that makes us momentarily forget his real wealth. We have spoken of the annoying tendency to pleonasm in Lucian's style, which must be laid at the door of rhetoric. On the other hand let it have part of the credit for a thing of vastly more importance, his choice of dialogue as a form when he took to letters. It is quite obvious that he was naturally a man of detached mind, with an inclination for looking at both sides of a question. This was no doubt strengthened by the common practice among professional rhetoricians of writing speeches on both sides of imaginary cases. The level-headedness produced by this combination of nature and training naturally led to the selection of dialogue. In one of the preliminary trials of _The double Indictment, Drink_, being one of the parties, and consciously incapable at the moment of doing herself justice, employs her opponent, _The Academy_, to plead for as well as against her. There are a good many pieces in which Lucian follows the same method. In _The Hall_ the legal form is actually kept; in the _Peregrine_ speeches are delivered by an admirer and a scorner of the hero; in _The Rhetorician's Vade mecum_ half the piece is an imaginary statement of the writer's enemy; in the _Apology for 'The dependent Scholar'_ there is a long imaginary objection set up to be afterwards disposed of; the _Saturnalian Letters_ are the cases of rich and poor put from opposite sides. None of these are dialogues; but they are all less perfect devices to secure the same object, the putting of the two views that the man of detached mind recognizes on every question. Not that justice is always the object; these devices, and dialogue still more, offer the further advantage of economy; no ideas need be wasted, if the subject is