manity awakened out of the night of the Middle Ages. How vast and wonderful were the needs for which these new languages had to provide expression! The invention of gunpowder, changing the whole art of war; the mariner's compass, opening sure ways across the pathless seas; the Copernican system of astronomy, giving the world and man for the first time their true place in the celestial spaces; the science of chemistry in place of the superstitions of alchemy; steam and gas, electricity and magnetism, the printing-press, the railroad, the steamship, the telegraph, the telephone, photography, wireless telegraphy, and now aviation:all these, as arts and processes of modern life, have driven every vigorous modern language into a chase for words and phrases expressive enough to keep up with the crowding thought and imagery of the life actually about us, and beyond the direct communication of ascertained facts able to utter the constantly deepening and broadening visions and longings of the expanding human soul. To urge the expressiveness of language is to exalt the supremacy of thought. The language which is chiefly occupied with its own beauties is dying or dead; the language struggling to utter what is still beyond itself is alive, and none has more of this expansive vigor than our own.

English was a young, rude dialect when Latin was old and in ornamental decay; and the circumstances of the development of the new aspirant for power have never permitted it to evolve like a potato-sprout in a cellar, white, protracted, and delicate. By the exigencies of its existence it has been thrashed into sturdiness and vigor through centuries of conflict. Ever and evermore the concentrated energy of expression of human thought and feeling has been thrust upon and through

and through the language as the essential condition of its existence.

Foremost in colonization, at the front in industrial and commercial achievement, possessed by that impulse of actual doing in the concrete world which we call "practical," full of the enthusiasm of freedom for each individual life, and yet with that power of combination that can cement millions scattered far over land and sea into the cohesion of an empire or a world-republic, spoken by more human beings than any other tongue now or in ages past existing among men, the number of persons using it being credibly estimated at one hundred and fifty millions, the English language must beyond all others seek and attain fulness of expression. It presses close up to the foremost line of the world's advance, to be ever ready with a new word or phrase for every new thought, discovery, invention, or achievement. Voices from every range of human endeavor and every outreach of human intellect are calling the. language on to express-express-express, ever more comprehensively and minutely all the shades and lines of thought and feeling, now plain and direct as a concrete highway, now toilsomely ascending as a mountain path, or yet again diversified with flower and shrub and rock and light and shade and sudden windings as a woodland road. Its ideal of utterance has come to be, not method, measure, melody, but meaning. "Fine writing," once the ideal of many young writers, is now disesteemed. The best speaking or writing of English will be done always by asking "What do I really mean to say?" or "What do I most deeply want to say?"in other phrase, "What for my purpose can words now and here best express?"

The present author has long believed that much thor

oughly correct English instruction fails by not keeping in view the higher possibilities of language, and by not awakening admiration, honor, and love for the English language as a great, beneficent, and living power. If students can be made to feel from the start that English is a grand, noble, and mighty means for the expression of thought, whether the simplest and plainest or the highest and most beautiful, they will feel a call to attain its mastery and a joy in bringing out its possibilities. Hence, in this work, the earnest endeavor has been to awaken interest, and even enthusiasm, for the language from the outset. For, what interests people they will learn, and learn readily. In a word, it has been believed that the rhetorical treatment of English speech may be made an attractive and an easy study, often fascinating as one follows its rich possibilities of expression.

The aim has been, as far as possible, to give principles rather than precepts. Comparatively little is learned by a series of commandments. The most excellent rules by themselves carry students but a little way. But a principle is living and of indefinite riches of application. Ideal is worth more than pattern. The precept settles one case; the principle is good for a thousand.

It has also been believed that the rhetorical use of English may be taught in English. The Greek masters of rhetoric so impressed their personality and their methods upon all students that the very Greek words they used have been maintained for centuries with a reverent fear that the contents would be lost if the receptacle were changed. Then the old schoolmen clung to the foreign phrases as making rhetoric an "art and mystery," which only the elect few could understand.

So our books still carry aposiopesis, prosopopeia, synecdoche, and zeugma, and similar scare-words, which even those who have once learned them in school are afraid to venture upon unprepared in later life. A few technical terms have been so far modernized that we do well to retain them, as synonym, simile, metaphor, etc. But the unfamiliar ones, if they mean anything, can be translated into English words, and if not, can be dropped. The plain English term has here been always preferred. Even difficult matters have been made to seem simple and easy where possible by simple explanations and the use of simple words. A seemingly off-hand statement has been put in place of a scholastic utterance in the belief that people learn best when they are not scared;-when the matter considered is presented, not as the rare attainment of a few erudite scholars, but as something "on the level," in which the multitude, they themselves, starting where they are, and as they are, may expect to attain success.

With the same object in view it has been found necessary to set limit to the number of topics treated. The "elements of rhetoric" are so numerous that any attempt to cover them all in a book of moderate size reduces them to little more than an inventory or catalogue. Such an inventory may be very useful, as a dictionary is, for definition and for reference, but it is not very readable. By its condensation all the elements of rhetoric are placed practically upon a level, with no chance for variety or emphasis or play of thought and fancy—that is, with no chance for the very things the book is to teach-so that a treatise on rhetoric is often the driest and most unreadable thing that one can take up. In place of such crowding, it has seemed better to treat quite fully certain main ele

ments of the study, opening vistas, at certain points, with confidence that the student will almost instinctively apply the method, thus found interesting and helpful, to other branches of the great study. He will not know all of rhetoric, but what he knows he will know.

This method of treatment has succeeded in actual trial. These chapters were lectures given for a series of years to a class of about fifty students in the Young Men's Christian Association of Washington, D. C., and also to a class of public school teachers assembled under the same auspices. The young men were clerks, stenographers, secretaries of senators, members of the staff of various Washington papers, etc. They represented hundreds of thousands of bright young Americans who have learned enough to know that they should know more, but engaged in the rush of life to make their way and their subsistence, and limited to such knowledge as could be rapidly gained. It was the importunity of these students, their delight in the course, and their assurance of its practical helpfulness that first moved the author to publish the series. The familiar personal tone of the class-room lecture has been to a considerable degree retained, and the student seeking to make his way in studying by himself has been remembered with interest and sympathy, and numerous simple directions given for his benefit, as throughout chapters VI, IX, XVIII, and XIX, and on pages 96, 104-107, 117, 120, 159, 174, 220-221, 257-258, 295, 315, 337, 340, 352, 372-3-4, and numerous others. Whether studied in the class or individually, it is believed the book will be found readable and helpful for the mastery of important points of English style. J. C. F.

Montclair, N. J., June 6, 1918.