vividly, as possible. And here we must return to what was said a moment ago concerning the character of Stoic morality, in order to show how this interpretation of appropriateness brings into play the rhetorical artifices which are characteristic of the Stoic style and were often so overdone in the periods that we are chiefly concerned with. If truth and reality were easily come at and declared themselves in the same unmistakable uniform terms to all inquiring minds, their expression in language would be a comparatively simple task. The style appropriate to the thing would be almost the same as that appropriate to the mind of the speaker. But it is not so, of course. The secrets of nature are made known only to attentive and collected minds, prepared by a long preliminary training in habits of exclusion and rejection; and even to them but partially, and in moments of rare and peculiar illumination. A style appropriate to the mind of the speaker, therefore, is one that portrays the process of acquiring the truth rather than the secure possession of it, and expresses ideas not only with clearness and brevity, but also with the ardor in which they were first conceived. It is no more a bare, unadorned, unimaginative style than the oratorical style is; it aims, just as oratory does, to move and please, as well as to teach, but is distinguished from oratory by the fact that it owes its persuasive power to a vivid and acute portrayal of individual experience rather than to the histrionic and sensuous expression of general ideas. The figures it uses, therefore, are not the "schemes," or figures of sound, which characterize oratory, but the figures of wit, the rhetorical means, that is, of conveying thought persuasively. Antithesis is one of the chief of these, not however as a figure of sound, which it may be, but as a means of expressing striking and unforeseen relations between the objects of thought. Closely connected with this is the study of "points," or argutiae; for the effect of points or turns of wit is found to be due nearly always to an open or veiled antithesis. These two, antithesis and point, are the chief means employed in the art of aphoristic condensation, which, as we have seen, is the normal form of Stoic rhetoric. Of equal importance with these, and of greater literary value, is the metaphor. If Aristotle first expounded the uses of this figure, the Stoics of the late Greek period, and especially those of the Roman Empire, may have the credit of having first shown fully in practise its marvelous expressive powers. It is the greatest of the figures by which literature may interpret the exact realities of experience; and is as much the characteristic possession of the essay style as the musical phrase is of the oratorical." It has been necessary to enter into these details concerning the Stoic rhetorical technique because all subsequent practise of the genus humile was affected by it; in the Stoics of the late Greek period, of the first and second centuries of the Roman Empire, and of the seventeenth century we encounter the same traits of style. We return now to the history of the genus humile at Rome. How much progress the opponents of the Ciceronian type of oratory had made during the last century of the Republic in domesticating the devices of Stoic rhetoric which have just been described we cannot say with definiteness, because the remains of the literary activity of the circles of the Scipios and Laelius, and of Brutus and Pollio, are singularly few and fragmentary. It may be that the example of Cato and the image of the primitive Roman gentleman preserved a simpler and plainer character in their prose, and made them chary of adopting too freely methods of expression which had the double taint of foreign culture and philosophic sophistication. We cannot say with certainty. But we know that in its theory and general outlines the Stoic rhetoric was approved and imitated by them. Cicero's testimony makes this sure. For he calls the kind of rhetoric which was usually (but without his approval) set in contrast with his own almost indifferently by the names genus humile or stilus Stoicus, and the terms in which he describes it in his rhetorical treatises show that it had the same general features that the genus humile had assumed in Greece during the third and second centuries: its brevity, its significant abruptness, its tendency to sententiousness, and its preference of " This form of style had, as we have seen, all the advantage of being associated in men's mind with the native Roman tradition. It was the "ancient" style in contrast with the Ciceronian model, which bore the imputation of Asianism and novelty. Why, we may well inquire, was it so slow in winning its way to a position When we read in Cicero's of preeminence in Roman letters? writings the names of the authors who represented it in his own "See note 37, time and the century before him we cannot fail to see that they are both more numerous and vastly more respectable and Roman than those of their literary opponents. Indeed if the name of Cicero himself is eliminated from the history of the grand style, a comparatively small number of important names remains to it. Yet this is unquestionably the style that won the greater successes during the pre-Augustan age and even in the Augustan age itself, whereas the Stoic style did not attain its proper triumph until a later generation and after it had submitted itself to the process of regularization and conventionalization in the schools of declamation. The explanation may be found in the uncompromising haughtiness of its pretensions during the earlier periods. It was intransigeant in two senses, both as Stoic and as 'ancient Roman.' Cicero's great success was due to his sympathy with popular tastes; and his own confidence and joy in the rightness of the rhetorical appeal which the people loved saves him from the imputation of insincerity. The Stoics, on the other hand, may have suffered from an excess of scruple. Their unwillingness to confess the aid of rhetoric or to study their characteristic modes of expression in the systematic and deliberate way in which they were later studied in the schools of declamation may have cost them their chance to be heard either in their own time or by later generations. These are mere speculations concerning an interesting fact. What is clear and certain is that Stoic style entered on a new and brilliant phase of its history with the foundation of the "schools of declamation," which first made their influence felt during the Augustan age, and later came to control the style of almost all Roman literature for more than two centuries. If there is a common misunderstanding in the mind of the general reader of the character of the training in the schools of declamation, the blame must be imputed to the scholars who have written on the subject. The fault commonly attributed to the teachers in these schools is too great a fondness for rhetorical artifice and the love of it for its own sake; and this is a sound indictment. But without the critical specifications that might be expected to accompany it in the statements of scholars it is more misleading than helpful; for it might more justly be brought against the masters of the style that the new schools repudiated and supplanted than against those that accepted their training and practised according to their precepts. A reader, for instance, who accepted the careless, denunciatory language of most modern historians on this subject rather than their actual meaning-would suppose that Seneca wrote with more rhetorical exuberance and display than Cicero, that Tacitus' style reflected a less exact image of the actual world than that of Livy, and that Juvenal and Persius are characterized by an habitual use of the flaccid ornaments of conventional rhetoric! 51 It is necessary, therefore, to point out that the purpose of the schools of declamation was to train their pupils in the practise of the genus humile-de re hominis magis quam de verbis agitantis. Their pretension was realism; their program the cultivation of all the means of individual expression at the expense of conventional beauty. It is true that they studied for this purpose the figures and devices that had been conventionalized by the rhetoricians of the Stoic schools of Greece; they even practised them with a more conscious art and found in them new resources for purely literary and rhetorical pleasure. But these figures and devices were metaphor, antithesis, paradox and "point"-the appropriate means for the literary expression of ingenious thought and acute realism. The name by which these schools were known has doubtless done much to create a prejudice against them; but the general custom of denunciation is due in a still greater degree to the fact that the period in which their influence culminated and produced its greatest results is conventionally treated as a period of literary decadence. That there was a general depreciation of moral values in the public and social life of the age of Nero and Domitian no one will deny; and it is probable that the literature of such an age reflects some of its evil conditions even in the character of works which are designed to correct them. But there is often an undue readiness to distribute the honors of degeneracy; and it is fair to -- recall that in great measure the literature of the silver age was literature of protest. The first fruits of the schools of declamation came to maturity during the Augustan age, in the writings of Ovid; and in the constant stylistic trickery, combined with the soft delicacy of sentiment and the absence of ideas that characterize these exercises in poetry there are grounds for the expectation of a literary decline. But the characteristic products of the next century Boissier's essay on the Schools of Declamation is very misleading in this way. P are not at all in that vein. On the contrary they are nearly all the new births of a union between the forms of style taught in the schools of declamation-Stoic, as we have seen, in their origin, but not necessarily so in their application-and a genuine and powerful movement of Stoic philosophy, which derived its impetus from a revolt of the best ideas of the age against the corruption prevalent in society. The style of the schools of declamation gained a new value, a new meaning, from this happy alliance. In the writings, of Seneca, Tacitus, Lucan, and Juvenal it served to recall the ideas of an age of Rome that seemed almost as primitive then as the Middle Ages do to us now, and reaped the advantages of that association with early native forms of prose which the Stoic style had always enjoyed. To this association, indeed, it partly owed its tremendous success. But on the other hand it might claim at the same time the honors of a "modern" style in a sense that that term has enjoyed in almost all periods; for its expressive and piquant forms lent themselves admirably to the needs of the new rationalists and their independent criticism of contemporary society. VI In previous sections of this paper we have seen that "Attic prose " in the seventeenth century denoted the genus humile, or philosophical essay-style, in contrast with the Ciceronian type of oratory; and have discussed the influence of the earlier Greek theorists and exemplars of this genus upon it. We have now to observe that the forms of the genus humile that were of practical use to it as models for its own imitation were the Roman forms whose history has been outlined in the preceding section. This statement must be made still more specific, however. The prose that actually determined the forms of its style was that Stoic prose of the first century of the empire-along with some later prose of the same school-which was alembicated in the schools of declamation. The traditions of the Republic on which "Silver-age Latinity" rested, to which it always referred, were valuable, it is true, to the seventeenth century, and it is for that reason that it has been considered so carefully here. The example of Brutus, for instance, was of incalculable advantage to it both in morals and rhetoric when it wished to describe in the clearest and purest terms the ideal to which it aspired, or to express most unequivocally the |