and of others of the prettiest if not the greatest things in literature, with sufficient appreciation of arts other than literature to have left us a capital collection of descriptions of painting,—it may seem that great, or at least interesting, literary criticism must have proceeded from him. Yet whoso shall go to the work of Flavius Philostratus[167] in search of this will be wofully disappointed, unless (and perhaps even if) he have the wisdom necessary to the acceptance of what the gods provide, and the more or less resigned relinquishment of what they do not. Footnote 167: Ed. Kayser. 2 vols., Leipsic, 1871. Philostratus is in fact a writer of considerable charm. The _Life of Apollonius_ is readable, not only for its matter and its literary associations with Keats through Burton; and the smaller _Lives of the Sophists_ are not unimportant for literary history. The _Eikones_ are perhaps the best descriptions of pictures before Diderot,[168] and the _Letters_ are really nectareous. Gifford, when deservedly trouncing Cumberland (_alias_ Sir Fretful Plagiary) for finding fault with Jonson because he made up the exquisite poem above cited from Philostratus, would have done better to vindicate the original as well from Cumberland’s bad taste and ignorance. “Despicable sophist,” “obscure collection of love-letters,” “parcel of unnatural, far-fetched conceits,” “calculated to disgust a man of Jonson’s classical taste,” are expressions which, as Gifford broadly hints, probably express not so much Cumberland’s own taste as that of his grandfather Bentley, who, if one of the greatest of scholars, was sometimes, if not always, one of the worst of literary critics. But Gifford, who, with all his acuteness, wit, and polemic power, represented too much the dregs of the neo-classic school on points of taste, was probably of no very different opinion. The fact is that, not merely in the passages which Ben has adapted, sometimes literally, for this marvellous cento, but in many others, the very wine, the very roses, of the luscious and florid school of poetical sentiment are given by Philostratus himself. Footnote 168: Achilles Tatius is later, and very likely imitated Philostratus. The two together perhaps give the best examples of _ecphrasis_ (see Index).