Page:Aristotle (Grant).djvu/99

 quoting: “The body,” says Aristotle, “is in its prime from the age of thirty to thirty-five, and the mind about the age of forty-nine.” It has been observed that university undergraduates are apt to consider these ages as set too high, while senior tutors have been known to complain of them as only applicable to precocious southern nations.

From what we have indicated it will be seen that the first two books of the ‘Rhetoric’ consist mainly of observations on human nature. Towards the close of them Aristotle fell upon the subject of fallacious “enthymemes,” and this led him to suspend the work he had in hand, and to write that treatise on “Sophistical Confutations,” or “Fallacies,” of which we have already given an account. After which he wrote his ‘Ethics,’ until the subject of “Justice” turned up, and he then went on to discuss the bases of this quality in his ‘Politics.’ The subject of “Education” seems to have led Aristotle off from the completion of the last-named treatise to write his ‘Art of Poetry,’ which naturally involved the discussion of rules of style; and this, by an equally natural transition, suggested the completion of the ‘Rhetoric,’ by the addition of a third book on Style and Arrangement.

This book has of course not quite so universal an interest as the former ones. The interest attaching to it is necessarily to some extent antiquarian—as, for instance, when Aristotle details the five points on which an idiomatic style in Greek depends,—viz., a proper use of connective particles; and of specially appropriate instead of general words; constructing the