In his attention to rhythm, especially of prose, Longinus is much less unique, for this point (as we have seen and shall see) was never neglected by the best ancient critics. But there is again something particularly distinguishing in his attempt to trace the sources of the literary pleasure in specimen passages. The ancient tendency is, though not universally, yet too generally, the other way, to select specimen passages merely as illustrations of general rules.

And this brings us to his greatest claim of all—that is to say, his attitude towards his subject as a whole. Although he nowhere |or rather sempiternity.| says as much in so many words, no one can read his book with attention—above all, no one can read it again and again critically—without seeing that to him literature was not a schedule of forms, departments, kinds, with candidates presenting themselves for the critic to admit them to one or the other, on and during their good behaviour; but a body of matter to be examined according to its fruits, according to its provision of the literary pleasure. When it has been examined it is still for the critic to explain and justify (according to those unwritten laws which govern him) his decision that this was good, this not so good, this bad,—to point out the reasons of success and failure, to arrange the symptoms, classify the methods, and so forth. Where Longinus fell short it was almost always because ancient literature had not provided him with enough material of certain kinds, not because he ruled these kinds out a priori. Longinus was no Rymer. We could submit even Shakespeare to him with very little fear, and be perfectly certain that he would not, with Rapin, pronounce Dantes Aligerus wanting in fire.^[241] Nay, with a sufficient body of material to set before him, we could trust him with very much more dangerous cases than Shakespeare and Dantes Aligerus.

Yet, as we have said, he stands alone. We must skip fifteen hundred years and come to Coleridge before we meet any critic entirely of his class, yet free from some of his limitations. The hand of the author of the Περὶ Ὕψους is not subdued, but raised to what he deals in. And his work remains towering among all other work of the class, the work of a critic at once Promethean and Epimethean in his kind, learning by the mistakes of all that had gone before, and presaging, with instinctive genius, much that was not to come for centuries after.

PHOTIUS—DETAILED EXAMINATION OF THE ‘BIBLIOTHECA’—IMPORTANCE OF ITS POSITION AS A BODY OF CRITICAL JUDGMENTS—TZETZES—JOHN THE SICELIOTE.

If the word Byzantine is not quite such a byword as it once was, it still has for the most part an uncomplimentary connotation. How far that connotation is justified in reference to our special subject can hardly be better set forth than by exposition of three books of the middle and later Byzantine period.^[242] The first shall be the remarkable and in a way famous Bibliotheca^[243] of Photius in the ninth century; the second, the Homeric Allegories of Tzetzes in the twelfth; the third, that commentary on the περὶ ἰδέων of Hermogenes by John the Siceliote in the thirteenth, which preserves to us our earliest reference to what is almost certainly the Περὶ Ὕψους, and assigns it to Longinus.

The first is in its way unique. The author, it may be barely necessary to say, was Patriarch of Constantinople for a period |Photius.| of nearly thirty years, though with an interval of ten, during which he was deposed or deprived (858-867, 877-886), in the latter half of the ninth century. He was originally a lay statesman, and, from causes no doubt political as well as religious, was much engaged in the disputes which led to the final separation between the Eastern and Western Churches. His birth- and death-dates are not known; but he was, in the year last mentioned—886—banished by Leo VI. to a monastery in Armenia. The Bibliotheca purports to be an account or review of books read during an embassy to Assyria, written for the benefit, and at the request, of the author’s brother Tarasius. There is no reason for questioning the excellent Patriarch’s veracity; but if he actually took with him the two hundred and eighty authors (some of them very voluminous) whom he summarises, he must have had one of the largest travelling libraries on record. The form is encyclopædic, each author having a separate article beginning Ἀνεγνώθη, “there was read:” and to a great extent these articles consist of summaries of the matter of the books. This, as it happens, is fortunate. Photius seems to have had a special fancy for giving précis of narrative, whether ostensibly historical or avowedly fictitious; and he has thus preserved for us all or almost all that we know of things so interesting as the Persica of Ctesias, and the Babylonica or Sinonis and Rhodanes of the romancer Iamblichus. Naturally enough, a good deal of his matter is theological, and his abstracts here are seasoned with a sometimes piquant, but seldom strictly critical, animus. But he by no means confines himself to mere summary, and we have in his book what we have nowhere else—a sort of critical review of a very large portion of Greek literature. Pretty full abstract after his own manner, and some extract of this, will be the best basis possible for considering the state of literary study and taste at what was perhaps the only cultivated capital of Europe, if not (putting the dimmer East out of the question) of the world, at the time when the classical languages were almost half a millennium past their real flourishing time, and when as yet only Anglo-Saxon to certainty, and some other Teutonic dialects probably, had arisen to represent the new vernaculars in any kind of literary performance.

Photius observes no order in his notices, which would appear to be genuine notes of reading; and most of his earliest entries are short, and devoted to writers possessing at best interest of matter. The first that has struck me as possessing the interest of literature is Art. 26, on Synesius. The characterisation of the good Bishop of Ptolemaïs runs thus: “As for phrase, he |Detailed examination of the Bibliotheca.| is lofty and has ὄγκος” (the word we encounter so often and find so hard to translate), “but swerves off to the over-poetical.” “His miscellaneous epistles” (the judgment just quoted is on his philosophical treatises on Providence, on Monarchy, &c.) “drip with grace and pleasure,^[244] not without strength and substance^[245] of thought.” The rest is personal and religious, but extremely interesting.

Art. 44 deals with Philostratus and his famous life of Apollonius of Tyana. The bulk of the notice, as we should expect, both from the Patriarch’s fancy for analysis of narrative and from his religious bent, is busied with the matter; but we have some actual criticism. He is as to his phrase “clear, graceful, and aphoristic, and teeming with sweetness;^[246] bent on obtaining honour by archaism and the fashionableness [or new-fangledness] of his constructions.”^[247] Josephus has Art. 47. He is “clean in phrasing, and clever at setting forth the intention of his speech distinctly and pleasantly; persuasive and agreeable in his speeches even if occasion compels him to speak in different senses; fertile in enthymemes on either side, and with gnomæ at command if ever any man had them; also most competent to infuse passions into his discourse, and a proved hand at awaking compassion and softening the reader.” All which (observe the strict rhetorical form of it) is very handsome towards that Ebrew Jew. The note (49) on Cyril of Alexandria, that he “keeps the character and idiom of the appropriate speech,” that “his style is fashioned and, as it were, forced to express idiosyncratic idea,”^[248] and “is like loose poetry that disdains metre,” is itself thoroughly idiosyncratic, and speaks Cyril very well. Two others, 55 and 75, of a somewhat acrid character, on Johannes Philoponus (“Matæoponus rather,” quoth our Patriarch), are, though acrid, by no means uncritical. All these are late and mainly ecclesiastical writers, though of a certain general literary interest. The first author, at once of considerable age and of purely literary value, to be very fully handled is the above-mentioned Ctesias, and we have only fragments whereby to control Photius’s criticism of him. But the paragraph which comes at the end of the abstract of the Persica, and applies both to that and to the Indica, is itself worth abstracting. “This historian is very clear and simple in language, so that his style is mixed with much pleasure. He uses the Ionic dialect, not throughout, like Herodotus, but partially. Nor does he, like that writer, divert his story to unseasonable digressions. But from the mythical matters with which Herodotus is reproached neither does Ctesias abstain, especially in the book called Indica. Still, the pleasure of his history consists chiefly in the arrangement of his narrative, which is strong in the pathetic and unexpected, and in the variation of it by dint of the mythical. His style is slipshod more than is fitting, often falling into mere vulgarity. But the style of Herodotus, both in this and other respects of the power and art of the Word, is the canon of the Ionic dialect.”

Appian’s Roman History and Arrian’s Parthica come in for successive notice, but there is nothing about the latter’s literary character till the much later and fuller notice of his Alexander-book at 91, where Photius, as is specially his wont with historians, gives a full appreciation. The pupil of Epictetus, he thinks, "is second to none among those who have best drawn up histories, for he is both first-rate at succinct narration, and he never hurts the continuousness of his history by unseasonable divagations and parentheses.^[249] He is original [“new-fangled,” the usual translation of καινοπρεπὴς, has a too unfavourable twist in it], rather by the arrangement of his words than by his vocabulary; and he manages this in such a fashion that hardly otherwise could the tale be told more clearly and luminously. He uses a vivid, euphonious, well-turned style, and has smoothness well mixed with grandeur.^[250] His neologisms are not directed to mere innovation à perte de vue,^[251] but close and emphatic, so as to be real figures of speech and not merely change for ordinary words.^[252] Wherefore clearness is his companion, not merely in this respect, but most of all in the arrangement and order and constitution of his style, which is the very craft-secret of clearness. For the use of merely straightforward periods is within the power of mere uncultivated persons,^[253] and, if it be maintained without admixture, brings the style down to flatness and meanness, whereto Arrian, clear as he is, has not approached. And he makes use of elliptic figures not in respect of his period but of his diction, so as never to become obscure: if any one should attempt to supply what is wanting, it would seem to tend towards the superfluous, and not really to complete the ellipse. The variety of his figures is also one of his strongest points—not changing at once from simple usage, but forming themselves gently and from the beginning, so as neither to annoy with satiety nor to worry by overcrowding. In short, if any be set against him in the matter of historical composition, many even of the old classics^[254] would be found his inferiors in taxis."

Appian has earlier had less elaborate praise, as being terse and plain in phrase, as truth-loving as possible, an expounder of strategic methods, and very good indeed at raising the depressed spirit of an army, or soothing its excitement, and exhibiting passion by means of speeches. It is odd enough, after the exaltation of Arrian—a good writer but no marvel—to the skies, to come across the following brief and grudging estimate, inserted in the shortest of summaries, of a man of the highest genius like Herodotus. Photius here, as elsewhere, does justice to the Halicarnassian as a canon of Ionic. “But he employs all manner of old wives' fables and divagations, whereby an intellectual sweetness runs through him,^[255] though these things sometimes obscure the comprehension of the history and efface its proper and corresponding type, since truth will not have her clearness clouded by myths, nor admit divagations (parecbaseis) further than is fitting.” This is rather dispiriting for the first really great writer whom we meet; and the long judgment upon Æschines, which follows shortly, makes little amends, because the orators had been criticised and characterised ad nauseam for a thousand years. Later we have no ill criticism of Dion Cassius—indeed Photius seems more at ease with post-Christian writers, even if they be non-Christians, than with the classics proper, or ἀρχαῖοι as he calls them. The careful and somewhat artificial style of this historian, his imitation of Thucydides, and some other things, are well but briefly noted.

It is evident that the good Patriarch was no sparing or infrequent novel-reader, for, as has been said, he is copious both on some novels that we have and on one that we have not. The somewhat monotonous form, however, of the Lower Greek Romance gives him more room for analysis of story than for criticism of art. He justly extols the propriety of Heliodorus, is properly shocked by the looseness of Achilles Tatius, and puts the lost Iamblichus between them in this respect. His criticism of the Æthiopica—of many million novel reviews the interesting first—may be given, apart, of course, from the argument of the book, which, as is usual with him, and not uncommon with his followers to-day, forms the bulk of the article.

“The book (syntagma) is of the dramatic kind [this is noteworthy], and it uses a style suitable to the plan, for it abounds in simplicity and sweetness, and in pathetic situations actual or expected. The narrative is diversified and unexpected, and has strange chance salvations^[256] and bright and pure diction. If, as is reasonable, it sometimes indulges in tropes, they, too, are brilliant, and exhibit the matter in hand. The periods are symmetrical and, on the whole, arranged with a view to succinctness. The plot and the rest are correspondent to the style. His yarn^[257] is of the love of a man and a woman, and he shows an anxious and careful observance of propriety of sentiment.”

In Art. 77, on the not very interesting subject of Eunapius, we have the familiar phrase “New Edition” in its literal Greek form.^[258] A fresh example of the interest he takes in history appears under the head of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and in Art. 90 Libanius supplies him with occasion for criticising a rhetorician pure and simple. He is, he thinks, exhibited to the best advantage^[259] in his “plasmatic” [speeches written on imaginary topics] and gymnastic discourses rather than in his others, for by his excessive elaboration and busybodyness^[260] in these others he has hurt the grace and charm of the,^[261] as one may say, naïf and impromptu style, and deprived it of verisimilitude, causing frequent obscurity by insertions, and sometimes even by abstraction of the necessary. “But in other respects he is a canon and standard of Attic speech.”

Lucian and the mysterious Lucius of Patræ seem to have occupied him together, and he discusses the authorship of the Ass with some acumen, recognising in Lucian a merely satiric intention, in Lucius a serious belief in magic and marvels. As for Lucian himself (respecting whom he has preserved for us the great epigram quoted above), he acknowledges the universality of the Samosatan’s satire of all things Greek, their god-making and their Aselgeia, the extravagances of their poets and their political mistakes, the emptiness and pretentiousness of their philosophy. In fact, says Photius, in an approach at least to the true Higher Criticism, “his whole pains are spent on producing a prose Comedy of Greek things. He himself seems to be one of those who worship nothing seriously; he scoffs and mocks at other’s doxies, but lays down no creed of his own, unless one should say that it is a creed to be creedless. In style he is of the very best, brilliant and classical, and signally distinguished in diction, and of all others a lover of good order and purity, with a clear and symmetrical magnificence. His composition is arranged so that the reader seems not to be reading prose, and as though a very pleasant song, without distinct musical accompaniment, were dropping into the ears of the hearers. And altogether, as we said, his style is of the very best, and ill-matched with the subjects at which he chose to laugh.”

Photius is not lavish of the word aristos, and it is only fair to say that, for its day and way, this criticism is not far itself from deserving the epithet.

After some shorter notices, including a good many of Lexicons (Photius himself, it need hardly be said, was a lexicographer), we come, at Art. 159, to Isocrates, on whom the Byzantine judgment is again noteworthy. He has more, Photius thinks, of the sophist than, like the other Nine, of the actual advocate. “His readers can see at once that he employs a distinct and pure style, and shows a great deal of care about the craftsmanship of his speeches, so that his order and his care overreach themselves a little and become excessive. In fact, this excess of apparatus does not so much provide genuine arguments as tasteless ineptitude.”^[262]

“Again, he is wanting in ethical character and truth and nervousness of style (γοργότης.) Of sublimity, so far as it suits political discourses, he mixes a very good dose, and suitably to his clearness. But his style is more languid^[263] than it ought to be. And he is not least blamed for attention to trifles, and a balancing of clauses^[264] which disgusts. But we say this in reference to the excellence of his speeches, pointing out what fails, and is exceptional in them, inasmuch as in comparison with some of those who have made bold to write speeches, even his shortcomings would appear to be excellence.”

Immediately before this article on Isocrates there is a very shrewd note (and one which is “for thoughts” to any one who has ever written books) on the Sophistike Paraskeue of Phrynichus. “This writer, if any ever was, is fullest of various knowledge, but otherwise redundant and garrulous: for when it was open to him to have got the matter completely finished off, without missing a single important point, in not a fifth part of his actual length, he, by saying things out of season, has stretched it out to an unmanageable bulk; and while he has collected for others' use the matter of a good and suitable treatise, he cannot be said to have made much use of it himself.”

It would be possible to extend these excerpts and abstracts very considerably from my notes of reading the great mass of the Bibliotheca; though the larger part of that mass is itself made up, not of literary criticisms at all, but, as has been said, of summaries, abstracts, and extracts. In not a few cases the longest articles deal with commentaries or anthologies, the Platonic studies of the rhetorician Aristides, the meletæ or declamations of Himerius, the Bibliotheca of Diodorus, the fortunately still extant Commonplace-books of Stobæus, and the like. But the foregoing pages have probably given sufficient foundation for a study of the Photian position, which may be taken, without rashness, as a very favourable representative of Byzantine criticism generally.^[265]

In making this estimate we must first of all take note of |Importance of its position as a body of critical judgment.| certain limitations, which may be accidental but which also may not. It is at least curious that he never deals directly with a poet. Even his indirect references, borrowed from his authors, to the greater Greek verse-writers are few, and, speaking with the reserves due in the case of so voluminous and peculiar a compilation as the Bibliotheca, I do not remember any independent poetical criticism of his. On the other hand, such criticisms as those which have been quoted above on Lucian, on Isocrates, on Phrynichus, and others, show, in the first place, no contemptible critical acumen, and in the second place, a critical attitude which is worthy of a good deal of attention. For the literary characteristics of his authors Photius distinctly “has a good eye”: he can see a church by daylight and a little more also. We may even say that he shows a good deal more detachment, more faculty of seeing his man in the round, than any purely classical critic displays. Here and there, as in his eulogy of Arrian, he is a little too technically rhetorical, and has evidently not got rid of the notion of the Figures as things possessing a real existence. And there is more than a trace in him of the growth of that critical jargon which has been noticed above, certain phrases recurring rather too often, like “gusto” with old-fashioned critics, and divers terms, which it is not necessary to mention, with new-fangled ones. But technicalities are, at their worst, an evidence that the techne exists. Further, it would be, as has been seen, extremely unjust to regard Photius as a mere phrase-monger. His criticism of Lucian is as comprehensive as it is shrewd, it is “criticism of life” as well as criticism of literature; that of Isocrates shows that he was not to be caught by mere scholastic elegance; that of Phrynichus, that he had an eye for method; his notices of the Romancers, that he could appreciate and relish kinds out of the beaten track of classical literary classification and practice; the remark on “merely straightforward periods” is a just and shrewd one. Not only would Photius have made an exceedingly good reviewer, but we may say that he is almost the patriarch of reviewers in two senses, that he is the first of all such as have dealt practically with literature from the reviewer’s point of view.

To say this is of course not to give unmitigated and indisputable praise. There is no lack of advocates of the devil who will say that the reviewer’s point of view is not easily found in a very original age, or by a very original genius. It may be so—the age of Photius himself was certainly not a very original age, except in countries where the point of view of the reviewer was as certainly quite unknown. But this is not the question for us; the question for us is, Have we met this attitude? Have we come upon any one occupying this point of view before? And the answer must, I think, be, “No; we have not.” Dionysius, of all our writers, comes nearest to it, for Quintilian is too summary, and Longinus is considering rather a single quality of literature, as shown in divers authors, than divers authors by themselves, and as presenting a combination of qualities in each case. What we would give almost anything for is a collection of such reviews by Aristotle; and we have not got them. We do not know that Aristotle ever thought of such a thing,^[266] though he might well have made it as a preparation for the Rhetoric and the Poetics, just as he made his collection of “polities” as a preparation for the Politics.

The absence of poetical criticism from Photius is specially to be regretted, because it leaves us in doubt as to his power of recognising and analysing, not merely the finer subtleties of form, but the more complex and interesting kinds of literary matter. His own interests, it is pretty clear, were, though he had the liking for novels which is often found in men of science and business, chiefly scientific, historical, and philosophical, including, of course, religion in philosophy. There is probably no Greek writer, whose subject in any way admitted of it, who has said so little about Homer. In dealing with Stobæus he has the patience (though, as has been seen, he is far from being a mere enumerator) to enumerate all the heads of the Florilegium and the Eclogæ, and all the authors, hundreds of them as there are, whom the anthologist has laid under contribution. But he is tempted into no critical asides about them. He is essentially positive—frankly busied with matter, or with the more material side of form.

Yet to the historian of criticism he has a singular interest, because of that position of origin which has been noted. Cicero and Pliny in their libraries were in a position to do much the same thing; had, as we shall see, a kind of dim velleity of doing it now and then, but did it not. Athenæus, if he had cared less for cooks and courtesans, more for literature; Aulus Gellius and Macrobius, if mere philology on the one hand, and mere folk-lore and mythology on the other, had not drawn them aside, would probably have anticipated him. But no one actually has; none has applied to the library or its prose division the process which goes to the making of a catalogue raisonné in painting. No doubt Photius leaves a good deal to be done, independently of his silence on poetry and drama. His comparison is so limited as to be almost non-existent; it is much if he can compare Heliodorus, Iamblichus, and Achilles Tatius in reference to the treatment of matters erotic; Ctesias and Herodotus, on the score of resisting, or succumbing to, story-telling digression. But even in this there is the germ, the rudiment, of the great Comparative Method. So again the other great Lamp of Criticism, the historical estimate, still has its shutter drawn for him. A vague distinction between the ἀρχαῖοι and the moderns is indeed not uncommon; but we have, so far as I have noticed, no distinct line drawn between the two, and both are huddled and jumbled together. Photius has not yet risen to that highest conception of criticism which involves the “grasping” of each author in his complete self, and the placing of him in the general literary map or genealogy (whichever phase may be preferred) of the world. And lastly, the silly old etiquette of silence about Latin still seems to weigh, if unconsciously, on him. He does indeed allude to the birth-year of Virgil. In his notices of historians of Rome he necessarily has to mention some Roman matters, and he mentions that Cicero was slain while reading the Medea. But my memory, assisted by Bekker’s excellent index, traces no critical remark, comparative or independent, about any great Latin writer, and nothing more than the barest mention of one or two by name. Yet, with all these drawbacks, the niche we have indicated is securely his, though he has scarcely yet been established in it.^[267]

If an example be required between Photius and John, it may be found (of no encouraging character) in the almost contemptible |Tzetzes.| Homeric Allegories of Tzetzes^[268] written in that dreary “political” verse, the only consolation of which is the remembrance that, whether as origin or echo, it has sometimes been connected with the charming Meum est propositum metre of the Latin Middle Ages. In Tzetzes, the allegorical method neither reaches its pinnacle of fantasticality as in the Romance of the Rose,—there is often something faintly fascinating there,—nor attains to the rather imposing mazes and meanderings of fifteenth-century personification, but stumbles along in pedestrian gropings of this kind^[269] (on Il. i. 517 sq.): “The groaning of Zeus signifieth a puff of wind moving the eyebrows of him, and conducting the thickness of clouds. The downcoming of Thetis indicates that there was rain, which is also a kind of consentment of assistance. And the coming of Zeus to his own home is the restoration of the atmosphere to its former condition, having thinned out the thickness of the cloud to rain. The rising up of the gods from their seats is the confusion and disturbance of the elements,” &c., &c. The much-ridiculed allegorical morals of the Gesta Romanorum are sense, poetry, piety, to this ineffably dull and childish attempt to substitute a cheap pseudo-scientific Euhemerism for the criticism of literature. If Allegory had not too profitably assisted at the cradle of Greek literature, she certainly infested its death-bed in her most decrepit and malignant aspect.

At the same time, we must not be too contemptuous of Byzantine criticism. Had the vast mass of the later rhetorical |John the Siceliote.| scholiasts yielded nothing to the sifting but the quotation in John the Siceliote (though as from the Philological Homilies, not the Περὶ Ὕψους), by name, of the Longinian censure on the Orithyia, it would almost be justified in existing, not to mention references in others, one of which shows us that in the same collection Longinus gave a discussion (the tendency of which we can easily guess) on the stomphodes or “mouthy.”^[270] But the siftings are not quite limited to these two.

John, who appears possibly, if not at all certainly, to have had the surname of Doxopater, and to have been sometimes designated by it, appears also to have been a monk. He must (on his own authority) have observed the virtue of Poverty much better than some of his fellows, and few of them can have more avoided the vice of laziness. His voluminous works devoted to Rhetoric are ranged by Walz^[271] under eleven titles: to wit, Prolegomena and Homilies on the Progymnasmata of Aphthonius, General Prolegomena to Rhetoric, Commentaries on the States, Inventions and Ideas of Hermogenes, Epideictic speeches on the Horse and against the Saracens, a destructive discussion of the myth of Prometheus, a “Basileios” and a “Politikon.” These works contain some personal details and complaints, which, if he subsequently became Patriarch of Constantinople, were heard by Fortune in her less savage mood; and he seems to have busied himself with theology and history, as well as rhetoric. But it is very difficult to place either his patriarchate, or consequently his life, chronologically. He might have been the John Glycas who held the dignity from 1316 to 1320, when he abdicated; but Glycas seems to have been married. So perhaps he was John Camater, an earlier occupant (under the Latin Empire) of the see in 1204.

All this, it will be seen, is a rather unsubstantial pageant; but John’s works are solid enough. Even the Prolegomena (taking them as his) of Doxopater, and the Commentaries on the Ideas (to which alone we have access), fill five hundred pages. It is in the latter that we are to look for anything touching our subject. They are rather wide-ranging, to which character of theirs we doubtless owe the Longinian citation.

Neither did John always observe that scrupulous accuracy which is so dear to the heart of a certain class of critic, that, like a true altruist, he would have every one, except himself, possess it. At the opening he writes “Themistocles” for “Miltiades.” But his erudition is considerable, and his qualities in other respects not contemptible. It is, however, very noticeable that he is as much inclined to the general and disinclined from the particular as if he had lived fifteen hundred years earlier. Although he is no slavish Platonist (he has somewhere the happy phrase Πλάτων Πλάτωνος ἀναξίως. “Did Plato? the less Plato he”), he is fully Platonic in his scorn of the μερικαὶ ἰδέαι, of the mere “characterising” speeches, Lysiac and Isocratean, and so forth, and aims at the “circumprehensive and comprehensive” idea and phrase which transcends all these. Thus we are once more face to face with that putting of the cart before the horse which has met us so often—with that discussion of δεινότης and γλυκύτης which is no doubt a capital thing in its way, but which ought to be preluded and, as military men say, “prepared” by a long, by an almost infinite, examination of the individual exponents and practitioners of the Vigorous and the Sweet.

It is, of course, fair to remember that he is annotating Hermogenes, and that he can hardly be expected to follow methods different from those of his text. But it necessarily follows that his loyalty leads him away from the fields most likely to be fertile for us, and, when he does approach them, directs him mainly to the Orators, and to them chiefly, if not wholly, from the strictly rhetorical point of view. Yet he is by no means ill to read, though a little technical and abstract, on rhythm (opening of Bk. i. chap. i.); and if he has gone no further in reference to φαντασία than all before him except Philostratus, that is no great reproach to him. Undoubtedly, however, his chief—as at the same time his most tantalising—attraction is his reference to things which, in his comparatively modern period, must have still existed, but which seem now to be irrecoverably lost. Such is his quotation, p. 93, of certain remarks of Longinus on the poet Menelaus.^[272] We may doubt whether definite poetical criticism from the excellent John would have been satisfactory, when we find him assigning “out-and-out”^[273] poetical quality to the soft inanity of Isocrates, and the want of it to the rough fire of Thucydides. Yet in the lower and “composition-book” kind of criticism he is not to seek—the synopsis of clearness at p. 173 being a very workmanlike composition.^[274]

And so, without further minute examination of this curiosity, we may take some general view of it as the last words—or fairly representative of the last words—of Greek rhetorical criticism, unaffected by mediæval literature, unaffected even by Latin, to any considerable, or at least avowed, extent, but turning round and round the long-guarded treasures of its own special hoard, like the dragons of fable. To us, perhaps, the hoard does not seem very inviting. The enormous apparatus of distinction and terminology is set to work, almost exclusively, on matter which has neither the attraction of the highest æsthetic problems, nor the practical interest and profit of direct literary criticism of particulars. There is abundance of learning, and by no means a dearth of mother-wit. But the worst side of Scholasticism—the side which was long unjustly taken for the whole, but which is a side thereof—makes itself almost universally felt. Sometimes one almost thinks of one of the keenest, if not the most generally delectable, strokes of Rabelaisian satire, the duel of signs between Panurge and Thaumast. This -tes and that -ia hurtle through the air almost without conveying understanding, though they may darken a good deal. With sufficient pains and goodwill, you may disinter many a shrewd remark, many a really useful definition, many a scrap of precious information, by no means unintelligently used. But on the whole, the impression is as of the ghost of Rhetoric struggling against being re-embodied as the soul of Criticism.