1848.] Occurrence of the Hiatus in Plutarch. 729 Sylburgius almost proverbial. Intentional dishonesty, however, lay so far from his whole way of thinking and feeling, that to defend him against such a charge in literary matters would be an insult." At the close of his fourth volume, Sintenis inserts a letter of about forty pages in length, addressed to Prof. Sauppe, then of Zürich, but now, we believe, of Jena, and relating to the practice of Plutarch in his Lives with regard to hiatus. In this letter he avows himself an unwilling convert, as far as his author is concerned, to Benseler's doctrine that the dislike of the hiatus which Isocrates shows in his writings was shared by other later writers; as the orators Polybius, Plutarch, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. If this can be proved in the case of any Greek author, it manifestly offers an occasion for conjectural emendation, and also puts a check upon it; for on the one hand the occurrence of hiatus will throw some suspicion upon the words in the sentence or upon their order of arrangement, while on the other it will be unlawful to propose emendations which contain an inadmissible hiatus. In his remarks Sintenis confines himself to the concourse of vowels in two words where either or both of them are long, reserving his opinion respecting the concourse of two short vowels for another occasion. He allows likewise to Plutarch more liberty than Isocrates retained; he is not offended by the forms of the article, by prepositions, by xaí, by numerals, nor by words forming together one notion when they make hiatus; and a pause likewise excuses this freedom in his estimation. The heads of proof that Plutarch did accommodate his style to the rhetorical rules of Isocrates are chiefly these: 1. The passages where hiatus occur, if compared with those of writers before Isocrates, as Xenophon and Thucydides, are very few. Three or four pages of these two last named authors or of Plato will contain about as many examples as the first six Lives of Plutarch. This contrast is rendered highly striking when passages from other authors who overlooked hiatus are quoted by Plutarch. In a law of Solon's, consisting of four lines only, there are more hiatuses than in the entire Lives of Solon and Poplicola. 2. Of the instances of hiatus in Plutarch many are corrected by the new readings. Thus of the forty-six occurring in the first six Lives, the manuscripts supply the correction for twenty-one. Now since this aid against hiatus is furnished by manuscripts neither very old, except the Sangermain one, nor very good, what might we not expect, asks Sintenis, if older and better books were at hand? 1 Sintenis is inclined to a freer use of interpunctions than some other editors. In consequence of his views in this respect, a number of hiatuses have the ban taken off from them. 3. To these proofs it may be added that the free and loose collocation of words, which some attribute to negligence in Plutarch, is in part due to the desire of avoiding hiatus, and that we may ascribe to the same origin the use of compound words, where simple ones would have been chosen by good writers of the older times. It is impossible to give these arguments their due weight without an extended examination of Plutarch's text particularly, as compared with the text of some author who flourished before the times of Isocrates. Sintenis takes the lives of Numa, Timoleon and Paulus Aemilius as touchstones of his theory; in the former, all the hiatuses of the wrong kind except one are removed by good manuscripts, or are found in passages suspicious for other reasons besides the occurrence of hiatus in them; and that one is removed by an elegant and almost certain emendation. As for the two other lives we will quote the words of Sintenis: "Ego quidem, quum reputo quam sint rara in conjunctis Timoleontis at Aemilii vitis hiatuum vestigia, ut quaevis Thucydidis, Platonis, Xenophontis pagina plures habeat, quam denique suspecta omnia, alia propter aliam causam, nihil habeo quod in hoc genere cum Plutarcheis comparare possim nisi Isocratea." After the number of passages containing hiatus is thus materially reduced by the aid of the manuscripts, it becomes an easy task to emend most of the remaining ones; and the great machine for so doing is to change the collocation of words. The right to do this may fairly be conceded to the critic; still it may be asked, in regard to all such passages, whether they may not have escaped from a writer contrary to his usual rule. Is it possible for the most careful writer, who composes as many works as we have from Plutarch's hand, to be ever awake to such petty solicitudes as that in regard to the hiatus; nay, must not the presence of more than usual earnestness or manly purpose in writing call his attention away to better and higher things? However, then, the ear of Plutarch may have been trained to dislike the hiatus-the proof of which is furnished with great ability by Sintenis-we are prepared by such general considerations to look for exceptions; although, we confess, that fewer instances remain after the present editor's criticisms than we could have supposed. From all that has been said it may be gathered that a new era has begun as to the text of Plutarch's Lives, and that they have found a most careful, thorough and sagacious editor. Yale College. T. D. W. [IN the Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. II. pp. 12 seq. was given an Abstract of the First Part of Schott's Theorie der Beredsamkeit. In the Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. III. pp. 461 seq. was given an Abstract of the Second Part of the same work. The First Division of the Third Part is condensed into the present Article. Its German title is: Theorie der rednerischen Anordnung, mit besonderer Anwendung auf die geistliche Rede. It occupies 254 pages of the third volume of Schott's entire treatise.] 1. Importance of a regular Plan for a Sermon. The constructing of a good plan for a discourse requires not merely a general, but also a minute, thorough, profound acquaintance with the subject to which the discourse is devoted. Hence the want of a complete mastery over the theme is a frequent cause of the failure in the plan of presenting it, (and the search for an apposite order of the thoughts is a valuable means of suggesting the right thoughts themselves). As the sermon is designed to bring the hearers into entire sympathy with the preacher, it must exhibit that arrangement of ideas which can be most easily followed. As the preacher is engaged in an important colloquy with his hearers, he must follow it up on his part in a direct and an intelligible method. This method is useful, first to him in preparing his address, and secondly to them in understanding it. He must pursue a business-like course, going straightforward to his object; and this is method. He must adopt the order of progress, of advancement from the less to the greater; for it is a rule in aesthetics as well as morals, that there should be a uniform improvement, and that the last should be the best. He must also adhere constantly and perseveringly to this progressive plan; for it is equally a rule both of rhetoric and of morals, that there be no deviation from the right course, no averting of the aim from the best object of pursuit. The instant that a hearer fails to see the design of a remark, he fails of the requisite union between himself and the speaker. The demand made upon the orator is, that he first enlighten and convince his audience; and he cannot fulfil this demand by barely presenting ideas; he must present them in the fitting relation to one another. He must next enkindle the imagination, arouse the feelings, and persuade the will; and must exercise no little sagacity in determining the order in which he shall address these different parts of our constitution. He is not exclusively to pursue the method of logic, but also that of an enlarged psychology. He is to consult all the principles of our nature, and to adapt his discourse to them according to the plan which is suggested by an extensive acquaintance with mental and moral science, and with the peculiar characteristics of his own auditory. 2. Remarks on the different Kinds of the Introduction. A discourse may be divided into three general parts; the Introduction, the Prosecution of the subject and the Conclusion, (beginning, middle and end). By the old writers on homiletics the introduction was distinguished into three kinds: the Exordium generale, which preceded the reading of the text; the Exordium speciale, which exhibited the transition from the text to the theme; and the Exordium specialissimum, which followed the announcement of the subject and prepared the way for the body of the discourse. According to the Greek and Latin rhetoricians, the introduction is that part of a discourse which is designed auditorem attentum, docilem, benevolum reddere. All that part of the sermon, then, which is intended to prepare the hearers for the body of the sermon, by bringing them into the same circle of ideas, and into sympathy of feeling with the speaker, is the introduction. The ancient distinction between the exordium and the narratio facti, however appropriate to the Greek and Latin oration, is less proper for the sermon; but here the narration or explanation, instead of being a part distinct by itself, is involved in one of the other parts, the exordium, or the prosecution of the subject, or in a subordinate part, the transition from the text to the theme. Equally improper for the sermon is another distinction of the ancient rhetoricians, between the exordium in the restricted sense or the direct exordium (principium), and the indirect or the insinuating exordium (insinuatio, qodos). The latter is the style of introduction which an orator adopts when he fears to present his subject directly to his hearers because they are prejudiced against it, and he therefore conceals for a time his real design, assumes the appearance of intending to speak on a different theme, and after having thus secured their attention and engaged their interest in himself, he comes in a circuit unforeseen by 1848.] Different Kinds of the Introduction. 733 them to the real subject of the oration. In the process of this insinuating exordium he adopts the various arts of the captatio benevolentiae, to disarm his hearers of their hostile prepossessions and to ingratiate his subject into their favor. Thus Cicero, in his second Oration on the Agrarian Law, designed to oppose the division of lands among the people, but in order to preclude the selfish prejudices of those who were hoping to gain something by this distribution of the public property, he began by acknowledging his obligations to the Roman people, declaring his hearty love for them and his resolution to remain a consul popularis; and having thus prepared the way, he at length avowed that because he was determined to protect the interests of the people, he would not approve the Agrarian Law. In deliberative orations, where the spirit of party, where strong personal predilections and selfish passions are to be made subservient to the orator, he may avail himself of these circuitous and insinuating introductions. But in the calm sphere of pulpit eloquence, the noble object of which is to merge all individual interests into the common good, and persuade the will to virtue by the elevating and purifying motives of Christianity, all these artifices are needless and inappropriate. They are dissonant from the simple and honest spirit of the religion of Jesus. The preacher should indeed employ a manly wisdom in regulating the prepossessions and caprices which may obstruct the influence of his address, but he should take a direct and straight-forward way to this desirable end, and have no fellowship with works of darkness. As the ancient rhetoricians distinguished between the exordium and the narration, they did not regard the former as an essential or even an important part of every discourse, but allowed it to be dispensed with frequently. The subject of the deliberative or judicial oration having been previously known to the hearers, and their minds having been prepared for it before they listened to the orator, he might often with perfect safety proceed at once in mediam rem; see Cicero pro Cluentio. Neither the ancient nor the modern preachers have uniformly adhered to the practice of beginning their discourses with the technical exordium. Where their themes are previously and favorably known to the hearer, there is the less need of technically introducing them. The homily, much more frequently than the regular sermon, may dispense with the exordium, for it is a loose composition, and does not require the artistic method. Still the homily should have one prominent train of thought, and the audience may sometimes need to be prepared for it by remarks adapted to win their attention. So, too, where the general subject of the discourse is antecedently known to the hearers (as on feast-days, at funerals, etc.), they may |