There are foure kinds of tropes, substitution, comprehension, comparation, simulation. The affection of a trope is the quality whereby it requires a second resolution. These affections are five: abuse, duplication, continuation, superlocution, sublocution. A figure is an affecting kind of speech without consideration had of any borrowed sense. A figure is two-fold: relative and independent,
and he names over in his jargon the six figures which are of each kind.[[150]] If this be rhetoric, perhaps there was justification for John Smith's The Mysterie of Rhetorique Unvailed (1657), which continued the fallacious tradition by dividing rhetoric into elocution and pronunciation.
This perversion of rhetoric which considered it as concerned only with style, or aureate language, was not restricted to the school books. The popular use of rhetoric as synonymous with "fine honeyed speech,"[[151]] is seen in a passage from Old Fortunatus, where it carries the modern connotation of a meretricious substitute for genuine feeling, as where Agripyne says,
"Methinks a soldier is the most faithful lover of all men else; for his affection stands not upon compliment. His wooing is plain home spun stuff; there's no outlandish thread in it, no rhetoric."[[152]]
3. The Recovery of Classical Rhetoric
A half century before Smith unveiled the mysteries of rhetoric, Bacon had in his Advancement of Learning (1605) pointed out the fallacies of the renaissance obsession with style. He briefly traces the causes of the renaissance study of language and adds:
"This grew speedily to an excesse; for men began to hunt more after wordes than matter, and more after the choisenesse of the Phrase and the round and cleane composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their workes with tropes and figures, then after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement."[[153]]
Sooner or later the school books had to reform. The Latin school rhetoric of Thomas Vicars (1621), after one has perused the treatise of his predecessors and contemporaries, is so conservative as to appear startling. It has all the air of a novelty. Yet all he does is to return to the classical tradition by defining rhetoric as the art of correct or effective speech having five parts: inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio[[154]]. And Thomas Farnaby, whose Index Rhetoricus appeared in six editions between 1633 and 1654, gives a fairly proportioned treatment of inventio, dispositio, elocutio, and actio. Memoria he omits, following here, as elsewhere, the sound leadership of Vossius.
4. Channels of Classical Theory
This perversion of rhetorical theory in the middle ages and early renaissance had resulted not from mere wrong-headedness on the part of the rhetoricians, but from the limited knowledge of classical tradition during the middle ages. Especially was this true in those parts of western Europe, such as England, which were remote from the Mediterranean countries which better preserved the heritage of Greece and Rome. Moreover, the most important classical treatises on the theory of poetry--by Aristotle and Longinus--were almost unknown throughout the middle ages, and the rhetorical writings of Cicero and Quintilian were known only in fragments.