Whose workes surely in respecte of his singuler eloquence and brave composition of apt words and sentences, let the learned examine and make tryall thereof through all the partes of Rethoricke, in fitte phrases, in pithy sentences, in gallant tropes, in flowing speech, in plaine sence.[229]
Thus rhetoric is considered merely as style; and the implication seems to be that the poets who would improve their style might well imitate Lyly. Webbe evidently means what he says in identifying poetry and rhetoric in style. He adds:
Thus it appeareth both Eloquence and Poetrie to have had their beginning and original from these exercises, beeing framed in such sweete measure of sentences and pleasant harmonie called ῥυθμός which is an apt composition of wordes or clauses, drawing as it were by force the hearers eares even whether soever it lysteth, that _Plato_ affirmeth therein to be contained γοητεία, an inchantment, as it were to persuade.[230]
The confusion thus is carried pretty far by Webbe, who makes poetry and rhetoric the same in style, both aiming at persuasion. Not only have poetic and rhetoric for him a common ground in diction, but the ideal of diction is the same for both. The diction of poetry is the same as the diction of oratory. The only difference to him is that poetry is in verse and oratory in prose.
Poetry, therefore, is where any worke is learnedly compiled in measurable speech, and framed in wordes conteyning number or proportion of just syllables, delighting the readers or hearers as well by the apt and decent framing of wordes in equal resemblance of quantity--commonly called verse, as by the skylfull handling of the matter.[231]
Webbe organizes his treatise in good rhetorical fashion. First come seventeen pages of history, mentioning with perfunctory comment the best known poets of classical antiquity and of England. The remainder of the _Discourse_ is devoted to the theory of poetry, which he divides into matter and form. Matter, which receives nineteen pages, is the mediæval _doctrina_, for the whole gist of this section is that moral lessons are derivable from the poets. By form he means verse, making no mention of the figures of speech. English rimes receive half of this space, and classical meters the remainder. Webbe's fund of critical opinion is not opulent. His treatise is based on traditional English opinion of the middle ages, with an increment of Horace, of whom he thinks so highly as to append to his treatise an English translation of the "Cannons or generall cautions of poetry," which Georgius Fabricius Chemnicensis (1560) had digested from the _Ars Poetica_, and the _Epistles_.
