i62 ANTIENT METAPHYSICS. Book III. 



cularly by what he has written upon Poetry, the fineft of all the 

 fine arts *, and upon Rhetoric, the mod ufeful of them, as it is 

 only by it that a free government, in which men muft be perfuaded 

 before they a61:, can be carried onf. In his Poetics, as I have obfcrv- 

 ed J, he has given us the philofophy, not only of that art, but of all 

 the fine arts; (howing us what they imitate and how they imitate; 

 and letting us know that it is only imitation, and not verfification, 

 that makes them arts. And, indeed, it was proper that he fhould let 

 the reader know this; for, in antient times, all writing in Greece, 

 upon every fubjed, even upon philofophy, was in verfe, (and ac- 

 cordingly Ariftotle, in his Poetics, mentions the philofophy of Em- 

 pedocles as being in verfe,) becaufe they thought, that whatever 

 was worthy to be committed to writing, and in that way preferved, 

 fhould have all the ornament that language could beftow upon it ; 

 and it is recorded, that one Pherecydcs was the firft man who wrote 

 in profe. Ariftotle, therefore, tells us, that it is not verfe which 

 makes poetry, but only imitation^ though in profe : And, accord- 

 ingly, he fpeaks of the ^uk^uti-koi "Koyoi (that is the Dialogues of Pla- 

 to, where Socrates is the chief fpeaker, and which have always fome 

 kind of fable, or ftory interwoven with them) as pieces of poetry. 



I will conclude this chapter upon Ariftotle with an obfervatlon 

 that I have made in the 6th volume of the Origin of Language §, 

 and which ftiows him, more perhaps than any thing I have men- 

 tioned, to have been a moft extraordinary man. It is this, that he 

 lived no more than Gt^ years, three of which he fpent in the fchool 

 cf Socrates, twenty under Plato, and eight in educating the conquer- 

 or of the world ; yet he found time, as Diogenes Laertius informs 

 us, to write 400 books, (or (rwyy^aufLocruy as Laertius calls them,) of 



which 



* Page 54. of Vol. 6. of Origin of Language. f Vol. 4. of this work, p. 182. 



t P^g^ 54- of Vol. 6. of Origin of Language. § Ibid. ^^. 



