On the whole, the arguments which it requires the greatest nicety of art to refute effectually … are those which are so very weak and silly that it i… - Richard Whately

There is, I conceive, no point in which the idea of dishonest artifice is in most people's minds so intimately associated with that of Rhetoric, as the address to the Feelings or Active Principles of our nature. This is usually stigmatized as "an appeal to the Passions instead of the Reason;" as if Reason alone could ever influence the Will, and operate as a motive, which it no more can, than the eyes, which show a man his road, can enable him to move from place to place; or than a ship provided with a compass, can sail without a wind.

Cicero is hardly to be reckoned … for he delighted so much more in the practice, than in the theory, of his art, that he is perpetually drawn off from the rigid philosophical analysis of its principles, into discursive declamations, always eloquent indeed, and often highly interesting, but adverse to regularity of system, and frequently as unsatisfactory to the practical student as to the Philosopher.

In the present day, however, the province of Rhetoric, in the widest acceptation that would reckoned admissible, comprehends all "Composition in Prose;" in the narrowest sense, it would be limited to "Persuasive Speaking."