This is all that, as a critic, Maximus has to say on this head; and though at least equally ingenious in evasion, he gives us nothing more solid in the debate on Homer and Plato.[163] He speaks, indeed, words of sense (by no means always kept in mind by critics) as to the absolute compatibility of admiration of Homer with admiration of Plato. But his argument for this, and at the same time the whole argument of the essay, is only a kind of “fetch.” Homer was banished from the Platonic Republic not because Plato thought him bad _per se_, but because the special conditions of the Republic itself made Homer an inconvenient inmate. He was not qualified for admission to this particular club: that was all. Equally far from our orbit is a third essay, the Thirty-second,[164] the subject of which is, “Is there any definite philosophic opinion[165] in Homer?” Elsewhere Maximus has refused to include literary criticism where it might justly have been expected: here (with, it must be admitted, much countenance from persons in more recent times, and especially in the present day) he determines to import into literary criticism things which have no business there. He begins, indeed, with a hearty and not unhappy eulogy of Homer himself for his range of subject and knowledge: but the rest of the piece is little more than an application of the theory laid down earlier, that philosophers and poets are only the same people in different coats, of antique or modern cut as the case may be, dancing to different tunes, and gesticulating in a different way. It may be so; but whether it is or not, Maximus has nothing more to tell us in our own division.[166] Footnote 163: Ibid., Part i. pp. 437-452. Footnote 164: Ibid., Part ii. pp. 115-136. Footnote 165: Literally any _heresy_—αἵρεσις. Footnote 166: The seeker will be even more disappointed if he follow up the quest to Diss. 37 (Part ii. p. 196): “Whether the liberal arts (ἐγκύκλια μαθήματα) contribute to virtue?” Only geometry and music, and mainly the latter, receive attention, though Rhetoric and Poetics are mentioned. There are not many positions in literary history more apparently covetable than that of being the first certain authority [Sidenote: _Philostratus._] for a definition of Imagination which (in a sense different from Sir Thomas Browne’s) “antiquates antiquity,” which anticipates Shakespeare, which has been piously but vainly thought to have been first reached in criticism by Addison, and which, in its fulness, and as critically put, waited for the Germans of the late eighteenth century, if not for their greater scholar Coleridge, to display it in perfection. When it is added that this person was a professional rhetorician, that he had sufficient original, or at least mimetic, skill to supply the pattern of “Drink to me only with thine eyes,”