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The same tradition is upheld by Charles Butler, who in his Latin school rhetoric defines rhetoric as the art of ornate speech and divides it into elocutio, a discussion of the tropes and figures, and pronuntiatio, the use of voice and gesture. And John Barton is worse.
Though he was not strictly either an orator or a philosopher, his works include both speeches and philosophical treatises; but his chief distinction and his permanent interest are as a novelist both in the literal and in the accepted sense of the word a writer of prose romances in which he carried the novella elocutio to the highest point it reached.
The Elocutio Novella, which he considered it his great work in life to expound and to practise, was partly a return upon the style of the older Latin authors, partly a new growth based, as theirs had been, on the actual language of common life.
And the Ad Herennium adds a divisio, which defines the issues, between the statement of facts and the proof. Cassiodorus divides the speech into six parts and so does Martianus Capella. Thomas Wilson offers seven. The third part of rhetoric is elocutio, or style, the choice and arrangement of words in a sentence. Quintilian's treatment of style is typical.
But while the survival of the mediaeval notion that rhetoric was concerned mainly with style thus gave over in the English Renaissance inventio and dispositio to logic, there naturally remained nothing of classical rhetoric but elocutio and pronuntiatio. A brief survey of the English rhetorics of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries will show that this was the case.
Consequently, in a work which he significantly entitles De inventione dialectica, he defines logic as the art of speaking in a probable manner concerning any topic which can be treated in a speech. According to Agricola's scheme, rhetoric retains "elocutio," style; and logic carries over "inventio," as his title shows, and "dispositio."
The student had to know the differences between the various kinds of cases, demonstrativum, deliberativum and judiciale; he must know the proportionate value to the orator of inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio, and how to manage each; he must know how to apply inventio in each of the six divisions of the speech: exordium, narratio, divisio, confirmatio, confutatio, conclusio.
Here the mnemonic system of "places," supposedly invented by Simonides, is explained obscurely. Even more obscure is its applicability to Hawes's subject. Of the 108 seven-line stanzas which Hawes devotes to rhetoric, 20 praise the poets; 7 define rhetoric; 13 explain inventio; 12, dispositio; 40, elocutio; 8, pronuntiatio; and 8, memoria. "Elocusyon," says Hawes, "exorneth the mater."
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: figures of speech and language, and rhythmical movement of the sentence, is universal.
This analysis of rhetoric into inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronuntiatio is to all intents and purposes universal in classical rhetoric and must be understood to give one a valid idea of its content.
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