Lecture the Fifteenth.

Of figures, or tropes

Clearness, propriety, and harmony, are not sufficient to answer the ends of oratory, which require beside these, that discourse should be lively and animated: to this purpose the use of figures is necessary; concerning which I now proceed to make some observations.

It is a question which hath received various answers, and occasioned no small debate, whence it cometh to pass, that figures render discourse more pleasing: what is there in the mind of man, which disposeth it to entertain with more delight, notions conveyed to it in this disguise, than in their own natural form?

The variety of opinions concerning this point seemeth to have sprung from hence, that different men fixing upon different causes, have persisted in reducing the effect, each to the cause assigned by himself, excluding all others; to the production of which effect several, perhaps many do concur. I will explain myself.