Longinus has been blamed by M. Egger[150] for comparing[151] this rhetorician with Demosthenes. But the excellent historian of Greek criticism must have forgotten the epigram, quoted elsewhere,[152] in which Aristides is frankly ranked, not merely with Demosthenes but with Thucydides, as a writer, as well as the other testimonies, both of antiquity and of the Renaissance, which are conveniently collected in an article of Jebb’s edition, to be found in that of Dindorf.[153] It is true that Dindorf himself speaks contemptuously of his client, but Dindorf was too deeply sworn a servant of strictly classical Greek to tolerate the pretensions of a _précieux_ of the Antonine age. As a matter of fact, not only is Aristides a good, though by no means easy,[154] writer of Greek, but both the qualities and the defects of his writing and the causes of his difficulty are such as ought to have disposed him to literary criticism in the best sense. This hardness does not arise from irregular syntax, nor from any of the commoner causes of “obscurity.” What makes it necessary to read him with no common care and attention is, in the first place, the cobweb-like subtlety, not to say tenuity and intricacy, of his thought; and, in the second, his use of not ostensibly strange or archaic language with the most elusive _nuances_ of difference from its common employment. Footnote 150: P. 481, _op. cit._ Footnote 151: The reading in Long., Frag. 1, is disputed, some suggesting _Hyperides_. But Sopater, in commenting on Aristides, attests the admiration of Longinus. Footnote 152: _V. supra_, p. 82. Footnote 153: 3 vols., Leipsic, 1829. The collection is at iii. 772. Although Dindorf says scornfully, _neque enim is scriptor est Aristides cui diutius quis immoretur_, would that all editors gave editions as well furnished! Footnote 154: Any one who has experienced a humiliating sense of initial bafflement may be encouraged, as the present writer was, by the round declaration of such a scholar as Reiske, that of all the Greek he had ever read outside of the speeches of Thucydides, Aristides was the most difficult. Ed. cit., iii. 788.