of rhetoric in its classical implications. When, in his poem, he discusses
the craft of writing as including "coulours gay," he refers to the figures
of classical rhetoric--Cicero's "_colores verborum_." And when he refers
to the "coma, colum, perydus," he is harking back to the classical
divisions of the rhythmical members of a sentence: the "comma, colon, et
periodus." In the classical treatises on rhetoric this division of
"elocutio" or style into two parts: (1) figures of speech and language,
and (2) rhythmical movement of the sentence, is universal. Lydgate's
rhetoric is thus a development of only one element of classical
rhetoric--style.

But Lydgate's rhetoric was not only restricted to style; it was expanded
to include the style of the poets as well as that of the prose writers, as
the last stanza shows. If Lydgate thought poetry to include anything more
than this style, he does not say so.

Lydgate does not present an isolated case of this meaning of rhetoric.
Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England the term
rhetoric and its related words regularly connoted skill in diction. A
rhetor was one who was a master of style.[122] Henryson, for instance,
calls rhetoric sweet, and Dunbar, ornate.[123] Chaucer admired Petrarch
for his "rethorike sweete" which illumined the poetry of Italy,[124] and
was himself in turn loved by Lydgate as the "nobler rethor poete of
brytagne,"[125] who is called "floure of rethoryk in Englisshe tong," by
John Walton.[126] According to James I both Gower and Chaucer sat on the
steps of rhetoric,[127] while Lyndesay includes Lydgate in the number and
asserts that all three rang the bell of rhetoric.[128] Bokenham calls
Gower, Chaucer, and Lydgate the "first rethoryens";[129] and as late as
1590, Chaucer and Lydgate are called "The first that ever elumined our
language with flowers of rethorick eloquence."[130] The entire period was