chaunting skill of Músicke; and with a tale forsooth he cómmeth unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from pláy, and old mén from the chimney corner; and, preténding no móre, doth intende the winning of the mind from wickednesse to vértue: even as the child is often brought to take móst whólsom things, by hiding them in such other as háve a pléasant tást: which, if one should beginne to tell them the nature of Aloes or Rhubarb they should recéive, woulde sooner take their Phisicke at their eares then at their mouth."

There appear to be 15 cadences in this passage; 9 of them commata, marked by a slight pause; 3 of them cola, marked by a more decided pause. The cropping up of the semicolon, which is apparently not provided for in classical numerous prose, reminds us again that we are handicapped by our ignorance of Sidney's punctuation. As for the two semicolons here, they may reasonably be replaced by the colon to indicate fairly heavy pauses. At the end we have the clausula, or period.

The English equivalent of each of the three forms of the cursus is to be found in the foregoing excerpt: 1. the cursus planus in "with obscúre definítions" (vóces testántur); 2. the cursus tardus in "mémory with doubtfulnesse" (méa curátio); 3. the cursus velox in "mèn from the chimney córner" (gáudia pervenire). But it is notable that the majority of Sidney's cadences here do not adapt themselves strictly to any of the forms of the cursus. It is further notable that out of the 15 cadences 8 receive stress on the last syllable, a phenomenon foreign to Latin. This deviation from the classical accentual system emphasizes specifically the strongly monosyllabic nature of the English vocabulary: 7 of these 8 endings are monosyllables.

Cadences are further made various by the distribution of the caesurae, which coincide with word-divisions. In the two examples of the cursus planus to be found in the passage under discussion, the caesurae differ in number and position: "with obscure definítions"; "delightfull propórtion".

From Shuckburgh's edition, p. 25. The punctuation of this passage differs with the edition; but the cadences remain-with but one or two negligible exceptions-intact.

After making all proper allowance for slight variations and substitutions, we find that only 5 out of these 15 cadences may be considered the equivalents of cursus. Ten of them, chiefly for reasons already pointed out, are what Professor Clark calls "indigenous".

In conclusion, it may be well to say that, although our consideration of the Arcadia has concerned itself largely with irregularities and "faults", I conceive of these eccentricities as the defects of the qualities of the Arcadian sentence. Some of them are doubtless inadvertent; most of them are unquestionably deliberate. The abandon, even wantonness, which results is surely one of the qualities which Sidney sought for his extravagant romance. His style is as apposite to his purpose as is the later style of Henry James to his very different purpose. The depicting of mental states in fiction requires, in the light of a new psychology, a medium subtler and more flexible than is ordinary speech; it may even demand a disregard for some of the accepted forms of idiom, etc. The oddities of Henry James's sentences are not mannerisms: they subtly contribute to the atmosphere of his situations. In like manner Sidney has taken liberties with sentence-form to help produce an atmosphere which is fitting for his wanton, often violent, adventures.

Turning from the enervating atmosphere in which the Arcadian sentence rankly thrives to the Apologie for Poetrie, we are exhilarated as by the coolness of a higher intellectual elevation. In both we hear the music of rhythm; but in the Apologie it is less hampered by the grotesque load it bears; it pulsates more freely, more simply. The Apologie is, as the ancients said of their prose, "winged with rhythm".

UNITY, COHERENCE, AND EMPHASIS

H. B. LATHROP

The attempt to discover in ancient rhetoric a satisfactory theoretical basis for modern writing broke down long ago. No thoroughgoing effort has been made to modify the traditional matter fundamentally, and to create a new theory adequate to the greatly expanded range of prose in modern. life. For years, empirical methods in the teaching of composition have been avowed by most of those concerned with the subject. Rhetoric has dropped out of the college curriculum; it is not even studied by specialists in the teaching of composition. The rule of thumb takes the place of any body of doctrine; and yet at the same time, with obvious inconsistency, some scraps of theory are snatched up and applied in the most sweepingly general fashion; and our textbooks present the appearance of a disorderly incongruity of conventions of language, suggestions for the collection of material and the taking of lecture-notes, the débris of a discarded theory, and principles which foreshadow the possibility of a dimly discerned new synthesis. The "minimum of theory” which every publisher's announcement of a new book in the field tells us is retained is very tenaciously adhered to, but very uncritically accepted.

The general laws of structure, especially, are now canonical; they are insisted on with almost mystic fervor, but without rigorous examination of their validity. Whether or no any coherent body of principles of rhetoric may be possible, it is certainly the case that what few principles are offered to the student should be solidly and fundamentally right. The purpose of this paper is to subject to scrutiny the central dogmas of the somewhat amorphous but very real modern assemblage of rhetorical beliefs,-namely, the teachings involved in the use of the terms, Unity, Coherence, and Emphasis.

These terms are due to Professor Barrett Wendell's English Composition, which following the efforts of the Scotch theorists, especially of Campbell, Bain, and Minto,2 to adapt and enlarge the conceptions of antiquity to modern needs, has had such an effect upon our modern theory and teaching of the subject. The word emphasis, indeed, is Professor G. R. Carpenter's amendment of Professor Wendell's original word mass, but the conception of Professor Wendell has remained since his time unchanged and almost unchallenged as the basis of our instruction in the structure of the sentence, the paragraph, and the whole composition. The discussion of the three terms and of the ideas which they represent requires a few words of definition; for there is some inadvertence in the common employment of them, and each is to be understood in a distinctly technical sense. Unity, then, as Professor Wendell employs the term, and as the term must be employed in distinction from coherence, has to do solely with the substance of thought in a composition. Any element of structure "piece of style"-possesses unity if it contains that which is essential to the realization of its fundamental idea, and no more. A composition fails of unity by defect if it omits that which is essential to the completeness of its thought. It fails-and this is the more frequent case-by excess, if it admits irrelevance, or digression, or appendages. A composition is not lacking in unity in Professor Wendell's sense if its parts are merely misplaced; that is a question of coherence or of emphasis. In Professor Wendell's use of the term, unity is violated only if that which is present has no place in the composition, or else if something essential is wholly

1 Wendell, Barrett, English Composition, 1891. Campbell, George, Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776.

Bain, Alexander, Manual of Rhetoric, 1st ed., 1866; 2d ed. 1887-1888. Minto, William, Manual of English Prose Literature, 1872.

It is worthy of remark that rhetoric, in the sense of the theory of prose style, has received no attention in England, but has been treated in English almost exclusively by Scotchmen, including Scotch Canadians, and Americans. To many in both countries the language is more or less foreign; and in both the spread of popular education brings the children of uneducated parents in numbers to institutions of higher learning.

Carpenter, G. R., Exercises in Rhetoric and English Composition, 1891; Exercises in Rhetoric and Composition (Advanced Course), 1893.

left out. The relevant matter being selected, the arrangement of it in logical order is a matter of coherence, sane speech being coherent as opposed to the incoherence, the lack of consecution, of the speech of the insane or the feeble-minded. Further, under the head of coherence is included the art of indicating the logical relation of parts by special devices of transition, coherence in this sense being opposed to the lack of cohesion, the falling to pieces, of material objects the parts of which are not held together by forces binding each to each. Emphasis, finally, is that aspect of structure which gives conspicuousness to the various parts in proportion to their importance.

There can be no doubt of the meaning of English Composition in the use of any of its terms. With a fidelity and scrupulousness as rare as they are commendable, a definition once given is adhered to without deviation or enlargement of meaning. Unity is concerned with "what may be included in a given composition"; the principle of unity is: "Every composition should group itself about one central idea." Unity "concerns itself chiefly with the immaterial ideas for which the material written words stand." 5 The test of unity is the practicability of being neatly summarized, a whole composition in a paragraph, a paragraph in a sentence. The analogy employed to illustrate the degrees of amplitude in the scale of a composition is drawn from the grouping of statistics; the scale varies as the statistics concern an individual, a family, a group of families, a state or a nation."

The unity in view, as the comparison implies, is the aggregation of discrete elements. Coherence is kept rigidly distinct from unity, and although the aspect of coherence as the systematic development of material is not wholly left out of sight, yet the aspect of it which is most insisted upon is consecutiveness in passing from part to part; the phrase which most often recurs is, "the relation of each part to its neighbor". Nowhere is a process of development thought of as a

Wendell, Barrett, English Composition, p. 29.

Ibid., p. 34.

Ibid., passim.

'Ibid., p. 31.