ABSTRACT
Plato was quite right to condemn Rhetoric as blameworthy and discreditable, directed to arouse the passions, a diet ruinous to health, a paint disastrous to beauty. The notion of ornament as something added on from outside forms the basis of the theory which Aristotle, the philosopher of Rhetoric, gave of the queen of ornaments, Metaphor. Aristotle classified the ornaments which diversify bare or nude form, under the heads of dialect forms, substitutions and epithets, prolongations, truncations and abbreviations of words, and other departures from common usage, and, finally, rhythm and harmony. The rhetorical forms were the subject of warm controversy. In Italy Cesarotti was contrasting the logical element or "cypher-terms" of language with the rhetorical element or "figure-terms", and rational eloquence with imaginative eloquence. The best scientific criticism of the theory of ornament is found scattered throughout the writings of De Sanctis, who when lecturing on rhetoric preached what he called anti-rhetoric.
