about style. It includes a list of fifty-seven figures of speech (_colores
verborum_) and eighteen figures of thought (_colores sententiarum_). This
is logically followed by the ten attributes of man. The seventh and final
chapter gives a long narrative poem of the horrific variety as an example
of tragedy and several letters as examples of dictamen.

Such a digest shows better than any generalization a complete confusion of
poetic and rhetoric. Poems were to be written according to the formulae of
orations; allegory throve. Infinite pains were to be expended on the
worthless niceties of conceited metrical structure and rhetorical figures.
Garland has neither real poetic nor real rhetoric.



2. Rhetoric as Aureate Language


As to the late middle ages rhetoric had come to mean to all intents
nothing more than style, it is frequently personified in picturesque
mediaeval allegory, never as being engaged in any useful occupation, but
as adding beauty, color, or charm to life. In the _Anticlaudianus_ of
Alanus de Insulis, Rhetoric is represented as painting and gilding the
pole of the Chariot of Prudence.[116] In the rhymed compendium of
universal knowledge which its author, Thomasin von Zirclaria, justly calls
_Der Wälsche Gast_, for learning was indeed a foreign guest in thirteenth
century Germany, rhetoric appears in a similar rôle. "Rhetoric," says
Thomasin, "clothes our speech with beautiful colors,"[117] and he gives as
his authority, "Tulljus, Quintiljan, Sidônjus," although Apollinaris
Sidonius seems to be the only one of the trio he had ever read.[118] This
theory lived to a vigorous old age. Palmieri, in his _Della Vita Civile_