THE WRITER BEING ONE OF A SERIES OF HANDBOOKS UPON PRACTICAL EXPRESSION A CORRELATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF ELOCUTION AND RHETORIC APPLIED TO EVERY DETAIL OF ENGLISH COMPOSITION. BY GEORGE L. RAYMOND, L.H.D., PROFESSOR OF ORATORY AND ESTHETIC CRITICISM IN THE COLLEGE OF NEW JERSEY AND GEORGE P. WHEELER, LITT.D., UNIVERSITY FELLOW IN ENGLISH, 1891-2, AND IN ORATORY AND ESTHETIC CRITICISM, SILVER, BURDETT AND COMPANY 1893 Edue T 768.93.740 Harvard College Library Dec. 20, 1918. Transferred from COPYRIGHT, 1893, ELECTROTYPING BY C. J. PETERS & SON PRESSWORK BY BERWICK & SMITH THE PROBLEM. "No general theory of expression seems yet to have been enunciated. The maxims contained in works on composition and rhetoric are presented in an unorganized form. Standing as isolated dogmas, as empirical generalizations, they are neither so clearly apprehended, nor so much respected, as they would be were they deduced from some simple first principle. We are told that 'brevity is the soul of wit.' We hear styles condemned as verbose or involved. . . . But, however influential the truths thus dogmatically embodied, they would be much more influential if reduced to something like scientific ordination. In this, as in other cases, conviction will be greatly strengthened when we understand the why. And we may be sure that a comprehension of the general principle from which the rules of composition result, will not only bring them home to us with greater force, but will discover to us other rules of like origin." - Herbert Spencer. ITS SOLUTION. "For my own part, I think that we ought to write and speak on the same principles and by the same laws.' - Quintilian. iii PREFACE. THIS book is a result of several facts and inferences from them, appealing to thought in an order somewhat as follows: In many schools and colleges, for various reasons, usually because of a lack of means with which to pay separate instructors, Elocution and Rhetoric are taught together. Might it not be well to prepare a book, or a series of books, meeting the requirements of this arrangement? Not only, however, are these two branches taught together, but, as a result of teaching them thus, many have come to hold a theory that, even aside from any question of convenience, they ought to be taught thus. This theory may be owing in part to that accommodation of thought to fact, at which, under the slightest stress of necessity, certain minds always have a happy faculty of arriving; but it is owing in part also to something else. This is the observation, that, as a rule, aptitude for Elocution is accompanied by aptitude for Rhetoric; and that, even when this is not so, the one, after a time, usually creates an aptitude for the other, as in the cases of many clergymen, lawyers, and lecturers who, beginning by being merely good elocutionists, come, in time, largely because they know just where to pause for breath, and to bring in accents, to have rhythmical styles of writing, which readily accommodate themselves to the natural requirements of easy reading. Besides this, almost everybody knows that a good literary style is cultivated better by reading good literature than by studying Rhetorics, however excellent; and he knows also that |