Under the head of invention John gives definitions, several examples of
good letters, a long list of proverbs under appropriate captions so that
the letter writer can quickly find the one to fit his context, and an
"elegiac, bucolic, ethic love poem" in fifty leonine verses, accompanied
by an inevitable allegorical interpretation.[111] Then he comes to
selection. Tully, he admits, puts arrangement after invention, "but," he
pleads, "in writing letters and documents poetically the art of selection
after that of invention is useful."[112] For he thinks of selection only
as the selection of words. A writer, he says, should select his words and
images according to the persons addressed. The court should be addressed
in the grand style; the city, in the middle style; and the country, in the
mean style.[113] One should arrange in three columns in a note-book the
words and comparisons appropriate to each style so that the material will
be handy when he wishes to write a letter. These principles John
illustrates with leonine verses and ecclesiastical epistles. Under
arrangement he says that all material must be so arranged as to have a
beginning, a middle, and an end. Then there are nine ways to begin a poem
and nine ways to begin a dictamen or epistle. Next he states that there
are six parts to an oration: "exordium, narracio, peticio, confirmacio,
confutacio, conclusio."[114] As an example of this division of the oration
into parts he quotes a long poem which persuades its reader to take up the
cross. Still under the general head of arrangement John explains the ten
ways of amplifying material. The tenth, "interpretacio," he illustrates by
telling a joke, and then amplifying it into a little comedy. "Comedy," he
says, "is a jocose poem beginning in sadness and ending in joy: a tragedy
is a poem composed in the grand style beginning in joy and ending in
grief."[115] Next follow the six metrical faults, the faults of
salutations in letters, a classification of the different kinds of poems,
and further talk on different styles in writing. His sixth chapter, on
ornament in meter and prose, presents what he has up to this left unsaid