Complete.

A RHETORICIAN of times past said that to make little things appear great was his profession. This is a shooe-maker, who can make a great shooe for a little foot. They would in Sparta have sent such a fellow to be whipp’d, for making profession of a lying and deceitful art: and I fancie that Archidamus, who was king of that country, was a little surpris’d at the answer of Thucydides, when enquiring of him, which was the better wrestler, Pericles, or he, he reply’d that it was hard to affirm; “for when I have thrown him,” said he, “he always perswades the spectators that he had no fall, and carries away the prize.” They who paint, pounce, and plaister up the ruins of women, filling up their wrinckles and deformities, are less to blame; because it is no great matter, whether we see them in their natural complexions, or no. Whereas these make it their business to deceive not our sight only, but our judgments, and to adulterate and corrupt the very essence of things. The republicks that have maintain’d themselves in a regular and well modell’d government, such as those of Lacedæmon and Crete, had orators in no very great esteem. Aristo did wisely define Rhetorick to be a science to perswade the people; Socrates and Plato, an art to flatter and deceive. And those who deny it in the general description, verifie it throughout in their precepts. The Mahometans will not suffer their children to be instructed in it, as being useless, and the Athenians perceiving of how pernicious consequence the practice of it was, it being in their city of universal esteem, order’d the principal part, which is to move affections, with their exordiums and perorations, to be taken away. ’Tis an engine invented, to manage and govern a disorderly and tumultuous rabble, and that never is made use of, but like physick to the sick, in the paroxysms of a discompos’d estate. In those, where the vulgar, or the ignorant, or both together, have been all-powerful, and able to give the law, as in those of Athens, Rhodes, and Rome, and where the publick affairs have been in a continual tempest of commotion, to such places have the orators always repair’d. And in truth, we shall find few persons in those republicks, who have push’d their fortunes to any great degree of eminence, without the assistance of elocution: Pompey, Cæsar, Crassus, Lucullus, Lentulus, and Metellus, have thence taken their chiefest spring to mount to that degree of authority to which they did at last arrive: making it of greater use to them, than arms, contrary to the opinion of better times. For L. Volumnius speaking publickly in favour of the election of Q. Fabius, and Pub. Decius, to the consular dignity: “These are men,” said he, “born for war, and great in execution, in the combat of the tongue altogether to seek; spirits truly consular. The subtle, eloquent, and learned are only good for the city, to make pretors of, to administer justice.” Eloquence flourished most at Rome, when the publick affairs were in the worst condition, and the republick most disquieted with intestine commotions, as a rank and untill’d soil bears the worst weeds. By which it should seem that a monarchical government has less need of it than any other; for the brutality, and facility, natural to the common people, and that render them subject to be turn’d and twin’d, and led by the ears, by this charming harmony of words, without weighing or considering the truth and reality of things by the force of reason: this facility, I say, is not easily found in a single person, and it is also more easie by good education and advice, to secure him from the impression of this poison. There was never any famous orator known to come out of Persia or Macedon.

  I have enter’d into this discourse upon the occasion of an Italian I lately receiv’d into my service and who was clerk of the kitchen to the late Cardinal Caraffa till his death. I put this fellow upon an account of his office: where he fell to discourse of this palate science, with such a settled countenance, and magisterial gravity, as if he had been handling some profound point of divinity. He made a learned distinction of the several sorts of appetites, of that a man has before he begins to eat, and of those after the second and third service: the means simply to satisfie the first, and then to raise and actuate the other two: the ordering of the sauces, first in general, and then proceeded to the qualities of the ingredients, and their effects: the differences of sallets according to their seasons, which aught to be serv’d up hot, and which cold: the manner of their garnishment and decoration, to render them yet more acceptable to the eye. After which he enter’d upon the order of the whole service, full of weighty and important considerations.

  And all this set out with lofty and magnifick words; the very same we make use of, when we discourse of the regiment of an empire.

  And yet even the Greeks themselves did very much admire, and highly applaud the order and disposition that Paulus Æmilius observ’d in the feast he made them at his return from Macedon; but I do not here speak of effects, I speak of words only. I do not know whether it may have the same operation upon other men that it has upon me; but when I hear our architects thunder out their bombast words of pilasters, architraves, and cornices, of the Corinthian and Dorick orders, and such like stuff, my imagination is presently possess’d with the palace of Apollidonius in “Amadis de Gaul”; when after all, I find them but the paltry pieces of my own kitchen door. And to hear men talk of metonymies, metaphors, and allegories, and other grammar words, would not a man think they signified some rare and exotick form of speaking? And this other is a gullery of the same stamp, to call the offices of our kingdom by the lofty titles of the Romans, though they have no similitude of function, and yet less authority and power. And this also, which I doubt will one day turn to the reproach of this age of ours, unworthily and indifferently to confer upon any we think fit the most glorious sirnames with which antiquity honor’d but one or two persons in several ages. Plato carried away the sirname of Divine, by so universal a consent, that never any one repin’d at it, or attempted to take it from him; and yet the Italians, who pretend, and with good reason, to more sprightly wits, and sounder discourses, than the other nations of their times, have lately honour’d Aretine with the same title; in whose writings, save a tumid phrase, set out with smart periods,—ingenious indeed, but far fetch’d and fantastick,—and eloquence (be it what it will) I see nothing above the ordinary writers of his time,—so far is he from approaching the ancient divinity. And we make nothing of giving the sirname of Great to princes, that have nothing in them above a popular grandeur.