advantage from them in the improvement of their style of thought and utterance. Some works on Rhetoric exert no appreciable practical effect on the style of the student. This is not a work about Rhetoric, but endeavors to present the very elements of effective expression of thought and emotion. Its good results will depend largely upon the care with which the theory is studied, and upon the repeated efforts made by the student to produce for himselt the various kinds of figures of speech and styles of composition analyzed and explained. This he should do, partly by the way of finding examples in his reading, and analyzing and classifying them, and partly by inventing original specimens. Part I. explains the primary elements which composition employs: WORDS, with directions how to obtain a copious, and correct, and efficient vocabulary. Part II. explains and illustrates another and more complicated class of the elements of expression, called FIGURES OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT. Part III. shows how these elements are combined and actually employed, and their result, in STYLE, and in the leading kinds of written and oral productions. Long dissertations on the theory of TASTE, and the beautiful and sublime, are intentionally omitted, as belonging more appropriately to Mental Philosophy. The province of Logic, also, is not encroached upon by dissertations on the relations of thoughts to each other, and the laws of Conviction and Persuasion. Often rules are given under these heads that no writer regards in practice. |