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It will be noticed that Latomus separates the Antecedent, Consequent, and Repugnant as a separate division of af'ectae under the heading hypo/he/lei as opposed to the others, which he labels purl. Fortunately, these hypothetical affects did not appeal to the critics of the sixteenth century,$a so that when we find Shakspere using them, especially since he labels them as rhetoric, it is practically certain that he had them from Topica.
But to return to Cicero, he next defines each of these terms, illustrating rather briefly each time with some point of law, usually a knotty one 4Therefore,Erasmus,Melanchthon,andothers justly complained of the difficulty of these illustrations for boys. When in 132,E Melanchthon published an edition of Topica with the commentaries of Boethius he pointed out that Cicero had drawn his illustrations from the law and so needed some explanation. In 1533, he added his own explanations, and these were frequently reprinted. So in spite of difficulties in the illustrations the schoolmasters hammered the definitions of Topica into the boys, and in some way the boys some-times learned to understand.'
All these matters except the aj'ectae center in a way upon definition, though notatia is a special form treated separately. It is "The designating the origin or power of a word; etymology: 'B We have seen that Shakspere frequently plays upon the etymology or notation of a word, as Leonatus, Miranda, mulier, etc. The definition proper involves a preliminary distinction between the part and the whole, leading to the distinction between division and partition. That Shakspere understood these distinctions is abundantly clear. After Cicero has defined the various afectae briefly, he then covers the whole system again in fuller form. For the whole, he begins with definitio.
Definitio, est oratio, quae id, quod definitur, explicat, quid sit. Definitio.-num autem duo sunt genera prima. Vnum earum rerum, quae sunt: alterum earum, quae intelliguntur. Esse ea dico, quae cerni, tangive possunt, vt fundum, aedeis, parietem, stillicidium, mancipium, pecudem, supellectilem, penus, cetera, quo ex genere quaedam interdum nobis definienda supt. Non esse rursus ea dico, quae tangi, demonstrariue non possunt, cerni tarnen animo, atq; intelligi possunt: vt, si vsucapionem, si tutelam, si gentem, si agnationem definias, quarum rerum nullum subest quasi corpus: est
" By omitting the hypothetical affects they could reduce Topica to the ten places of Aristotle. See the scheme of Latomus on the preceding page. 5 Cf. Fraunce, Laurier: Leeke, Ti v-1l r.
6 Erasmus presents a variant of this system, broken down into details, with much simpler illustrations, in his De Conscrikndis (Erasmus, Opera (1703), Vol. I, pp. 411 ff.).
5 White and Riddle.
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