the art of speaking copiously on any subject, with all the advantage of beauty and force.

Lord Bacon defines rhetoric, very philosophically, to be the art of applying and addressing the dictates of reason to the fancy, and of recommending them there so as to affect the will and desires. The end of rhetoric, the same author observes, is to fill the imagination with ideas and images which may assist nature without oppressing it. Voisins defines rhetoric, The faculty of discovering what every subject affords of use for persuasion. Hence, as every author must invent arguments to make his subject prevail; dispose those arguments, thus found out, in their proper places; and give them the embellishments of language proper to the subject; and, if this discourse be intended to be delivered in public, utter them with that decency and force which may strike the hearer; rhetoric becomes divided into four parts, invention, disposition, elocution, and pronunciation.

Rhetoric and oratory differ from each other as the theory from the practice; the rhetorician being he who describes the rules of eloquence, and the orator he who uses them to advantage. Ordinarily, however, the two are used indifferently for each other. See Composition