Demosthenes has at command all the discursive brilliancy which fascinates a festal audience.

He was, for his time, a voluminous as well as a very discursive writer.

It is discursive and badly arranged, but it is marked by a power of style, a vigour of narrative, and a skill in delineation of character which give life to the most unattractive period of German history; notwithstanding the extreme spirit of partisanship and some faults of taste, it will remain a remarkable monument of literary ability.

In mastery of prose language he has never been surpassed, when he chose to curb his florid imagination and his discursive eagerness of soul.

In 1878 he dug unsuccessfully in Ithaca, and in the same year and the following resumed work at Hissarlik, and summed up his results in a discursive memoir, Ilios, upon which a sequel, Troja, issued in 1884, after Wilhelm D6rpfeld, associated in 1882, had introduced some archaeological method into the explorations, was a considerable improvement.