The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

not another, you are using art all the same and yet
nobody notices it. (To be sure, if mild sentiments are expressed in
harsh tones and harsh sentiments in mild tones, you become
comparatively unconvincing.) Compound words, fairly plentiful
epithets, and strange words best suit an emotional speech. We
forgive an angry man for talking about a wrong as ‘heaven-high’ or
‘colossal’; and we excuse such language when the speaker has his
hearers already in his hands and has stirred them deeply either by
praise or blame or anger or affection, as Isocrates, for instance,
does at the end of his Panegyric, with his ‘name and fame’ and ‘in
that they brooked’. Men do speak in this strain when they are
deeply stirred, and so, once the audience is in a like state of
feeling, approval of course follows. This is why such language is
fitting in poetry, which is an inspired thing. This language, then,
should be used either under stress of emotion, or ironically, after
the manner of Gorgias and of the passages in the Phaedrus.
8
    The form of a prose composition should be neither metrical nor
destitute of rhythm. The metrical form destroys the hearer’s trust
by its artificial appearance, and at the same time it diverts his
attention, making him watch for metrical recurrences, just as
children catch up the herald’s question, ‘Whom does the freedman
choose as his advocate?’, with the answer ‘Cleon!’ On the other
hand, unrhythmical language is too unlimited; we do not want the
limitations of metre, but some limitation we must have, or the
effect will be vague and unsatisfactory. Now it is number that
limits all things; and it is the numerical limitation of the forms
of a composition that constitutes rhythm, of which metres are
definite sections. Prose, then, is to be rhythmical, but not
metrical, or it will become not prose but verse. It should not even
have too precise a prose rhythm, and therefore should only be
rhythmical to a certain extent.
    Of the various rhythms, the heroic has dignity, but lacks the
tones of the spoken language. The iambic is the very language of
ordinary people, so that in common talk iambic lines occur oftener
than any others: but in a speech we need dignity and the power of
taking the hearer out of his ordinary self. The trochee is too much
akin to wild dancing: we can see this in tetrameter verse, which is
one of the trochaic rhythms.
    There remains the paean, which speakers began to use in the time
of Thrasymachus, though they had then no name to give it. The paean
is a third class of rhythm, closely akin to both the two already
mentioned; it has in it the ratio of three to two, whereas the
other two kinds have the ratio of one to one, and two to one
respectively. Between the two last ratios comes the ratio of
one-and-a-half to one, which is that of the paean.
    Now the other two kinds of rhythm must be rejected in writing
prose, partly for the reasons given, and partly because they are
too metrical; and the paean must be adopted, since from this alone
of the rhythms mentioned no definite metre arises, and therefore it
is the least obtrusive of them. At present the same form of paean
is employed at the beginning a at the end of sentences, whereas the
end should differ from the beginning. There are two opposite kinds
of paean, one of which is suitable to the beginning of a sentence,
where it is indeed actually used; this is the kind that begins with
a long syllable and ends with three short ones, as
Dalogenes | eite Luki | an,
    and
Chruseokom | a Ekate | pai Dios.
    The other paean begins, conversely, with three short syllables
and ends with a long one, as
meta de lan | udata t ok | eanon e | oanise nux.
    This kind of paean makes a real close: a short syllable can give
no effect of finality, and therefore makes the rhythm appear
truncated. A sentence should break off with the long syllable: the
fact that it is over should be indicated not by the scribe, or by
his period-mark in the margin, but by the rhythm itself.
    We have now seen that our language must be rhythmical and not
destitute of rhythm, and what rhythms, in what particular shape,
make it so.
9
    The language of prose must be either free-running, with its
parts united by nothing except the connecting words, like the
preludes in dithyrambs; or compact and antithetical, like the
strophes of the old poets. The free-running style is the ancient
one, e.g. ‘Herein is set forth the inquiry of Herodotus the
Thurian.’ Every one used