3. The Recovery of Classical Rhetoric


A half century before Smith unveiled the mysteries of rhetoric, Bacon had
in his _Advancement of Learning_ (1605) pointed out the fallacies of the
renaissance obsession with style. He briefly traces the causes of the
renaissance study of language and adds:

"This grew speedily to an excesse; for men began to hunt more after
wordes than matter, and more after the choisenesse of the Phrase and the
round and cleane composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of
the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their workes with
tropes and figures, then after the weight of matter, worth of subject,
soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgement."[153]

Sooner or later the school books had to reform. The Latin school rhetoric
of Thomas Vicars (1621), after one has perused the treatise of his
predecessors and contemporaries, is so conservative as to appear
startling. It has all the air of a novelty. Yet all he does is to return
to the classical tradition by defining rhetoric as the art of correct or
effective speech having five parts: _inventio_, _dispositio_, _elocutio_,
_memoria_, and _pronuntiatio_[154]. And Thomas Farnaby, whose _Index
Rhetoricus_ appeared in six editions between 1633 and 1654, gives a fairly
proportioned treatment of _inventio_, _dispositio_, _elocutio_, and
_actio_. _Memoria_ he omits, following here, as elsewhere, the sound
leadership of Vossius.



4. Channels of Classical Theory