phrases. It is true that, if his pieces are taken each separately, he
is most happy with all these (though it is hard to forgive Alexander's
bathe in the Cydnus with which _The Hall_ opens); but when they are
read continuously, the repeated appearances of the tragic actor
disrobed, the dancing apes and their nuts, of Zeus's golden cord, and
of the 'two octaves apart,' produce an impression of poverty that
makes us momentarily forget his real wealth.

We have spoken of the annoying tendency to pleonasm in Lucian's style,
which must be laid at the door of rhetoric. On the other hand let it
have part of the credit for a thing of vastly more importance, his
choice of dialogue as a form when he took to letters. It is quite
obvious that he was naturally a man of detached mind, with an
inclination for looking at both sides of a question. This was no doubt
strengthened by the common practice among professional rhetoricians of
writing speeches on both sides of imaginary cases. The
level-headedness produced by this combination of nature and training
naturally led to the selection of dialogue. In one of the preliminary
trials of _The double Indictment, Drink_, being one of the parties,
and consciously incapable at the moment of doing herself justice,
employs her opponent, _The Academy_, to plead for as well as against
her. There are a good many pieces in which Lucian follows the same
method. In _The Hall_ the legal form is actually kept; in the
_Peregrine_ speeches are delivered by an admirer and a scorner of the
hero; in _The Rhetorician's Vade mecum_ half the piece is an imaginary
statement of the writer's enemy; in the _Apology for 'The dependent
Scholar'_ there is a long imaginary objection set up to be afterwards
disposed of; the _Saturnalian Letters_ are the cases of rich and poor
put from opposite sides. None of these are dialogues; but they are all
less perfect devices to secure the same object, the putting of the two