2. Rhetoric as Aureate Language As to the late middle ages rhetoric had come to mean to all intents nothing more than style, it is frequently personified in picturesque mediaeval allegory, never as being engaged in any useful occupation, but as adding beauty, color, or charm to life.

This street was the principal cotton market, and here the article which, in those days, was personified as the commercial "king," was bought and sold, and whence it was shipped, or stored, awaiting an advancing price.

Having personified for the antique world qualities which, though suppressed and ignored by militant and mediaeval Christianity, were strictly human, the Hellenic deities still signified those qualities for modern Europe, now at length re-fortified by contact with the ancient mind.

The subject is ostensibly concrete; but France in her agonies and triumphs has been personified into a superb symbol of Meredith's own reading of human fate.