Under the name rhetoric, as already mentioned, were joined to eloquence historic recitals, letter writing, didactic teaching, translations, and poetry. Few treatises on the art have survived. The Dominicans were fonder of practising than teaching it, and some who taught it correctly could not refrain from allegorizing on it in the style already alluded to. Under Molenier's management, three kings, Barbarisme, Solecisme [Footnote 130], and Allebolé, make war on three queens, Diction, Oration, and Sentence.
[Footnote 130: The Greek inhabitants of Soli in Cillcia suffered "their parts of speech" to be affected for the worse by intercourse with the neighboring barbarians. So the fastidious Athenians began to designate all infractions of grammar as solecisms.]
They possess in common ten arrows—pleonasm, tautology, ellipse, tapinosis, (obscurity, qu.,) etc. Allebolé has thirteen daughters, Barbarisme fourteen, and Solecisme twenty-two, and the number of grandchildren is not small. If any reader desires to see how men of some talent can lose themselves in matters trifling and intricate at the same time, let him procure Molenier's treatise, or even that of the chronicler Chastellain, where he will find Dame Rhetoric accompanied by science, gravity, multiform riches, flowery memory, noble nature, precious possession, laudable deduction, old acquisition, etc.
The professors of rhetoric in the middle ages had sundry classic writers to fall back on, such as Quintilian, Aristotle, Cicero, etc. They had also the aid of Priscian, Donatus, and Isadore of Seville. Among the earliest specimens of eloquence assuming the garb of the vulgar tongue was the eulogium pronounced on the brave Bertrand du Gueselin by the bishop of Auxerre, Ferrie Cassinel, at the request of Charles VI. A poet of the century thus described its effects:
"Les princes fondolent en larmes,
Des mots que l'evesque monstroit;
Quar il disoit, 'Plorez gens d'armes
Bertrant qui trestant vos amoit.
On doit regreter les fex d'armes
Qu'il fist au temps qu'il vivoit.
Dieux ait pitie sur toutes ames;
De la sienne quar bonne estoit.'"
[Footnote 131]
[Footnote 131:
"The princes melted in tears
At the words which the bishop spoke;
for he said, 'Weep, ye men of arms,
Bertrand, who so much loved you.
We should regret those feats of arms
Which he performed in the time he lived.
O God! have pity on all souls;
and in his, for he was good.'">[
Four men of that era distinguished themselves by eloquence at the bar, and in addressing assemblies in the tumultuous days of the poor demented king. Jean Faure and Guillaume le Breul besides their speeches, left behind them valuable works on jurisprudence; and their learned contemporary, Yves de Kaermarten, acquired such a good name that he was promoted to the Calendar of Saints. We are unable to quote any other gentleman of the bar whose sanctity attained the heroic degree. Renault d'Acie and Jean des Marès ventured among the political tempests of the day, and perished in their patriotic efforts.
Few instances of eloquence, ancient or modern, could surpass that of Charles the Bad, King of Navarre, if we can trust the chroniclers. Having been released from prison, and brought to Paris, 29th November, 1357, he ascended a platform near the Pre aux-cleres (the Clerk's Meadow) in the morning, and kept a considerable portion of his ten thousand auditors either crying at, or deeply sympathizing with, his pretended wrongs, till the dinner hour of the citizens had passed. He afterward scattered his poison among multitudes at the Greve and the Halles. His oration made to a deputation at St. Denis bears an annoying resemblance to some delivered not very long since in various American cities, by patriots of our own time:
"Gentlemen and friends," said he, "no ill luck can befall you which I will not freely share. But I strongly counsel you, while you govern Paris, to provide yourselves well with gold and silver. Confide in me. Send me here freely all that you can put together. I shall give you a good account of it, and will have at your service numerous men at arms, many comrades who shall defend you from your enemies."
The speeches of the wicked king were mostly prefaced by texts, but it is not rightly known whether this argumentum ad crumenam was so garnished.