Rhetoric. Aristotle proceeds to furnish. the orator with definitions and theories which he considered (at all events when he was writing this treatise) to belong to Rhetoric itself, though it would have perhaps been a better classification of science if he had merely indicated that a knowledge of these matters was necessary, and had referred the student to Moral Philosophy for full particulars with regard to them. The result is that he gives a brilliant summary by anticipation of a considerable portion of his ‘Ethics.’ As in the ‘Topics’ he thought it necessary to make long lists of commonplaces for the use of the dialectician, so here he gives lists of heads to be borne in mind by the deliberative orator. It is not necessary for us to follow Aristotle in anticipating his theory of morals. It need only be mentioned that, after premising that the idea of obtaining personal good, or happiness, is what actuates men in deliberation,—he proceeds to give what may be called a provisional theory of happiness and its component parts; he then specifies thirty different grounds on which a thing might be recommended as good, and forty other grounds upon which a thing might be shown to be comparatively good, or better than something else. He winds up his instructions for the deliberative orator with brief remarks on the scope and character of different forms of government, which are afterwards fully expanded in the ‘Politics.’
The oratory of display deals especially with praise and eulogy, as we know from the specimens of it most familiar to us—the funeral oration, and the postprandial speech. The orator in this kind must have
