The relatively considerable space, some six or seven pages, which is allotted to Libanius in Egger’s book, may have encouraged [Sidenote: _Libanius._] readers to expect some considerable contribution to critical literature from that sophist and rhetorician. But a careful reading of the French historian’s text will show that he has really nothing to produce to justify the space assigned: and an independent examination of Libanius himself (which, as hinted already, is not too easy to make[171]) will more than confirm this uncomfortable suspicion. Libanius is enormously copious, and he is not exactly contemptible,[172] seeing that he can apply the sort of “Wardour Street” Attic, in which he and the better class of his contemporaries wrote, to a large number of subjects with a great deal of skill. But the curse of artificiality is over everything that he writes:[173] and, to do him justice, his writings proclaim the fact beforehand with the most praiseworthy frankness. They belong almost entirely to those classes of conventional exercise of which full account has been given, and will be given, in the present Book and its successor. They are _Progymnasmata_, _Meletæ_, “orations,” that is to say, rather more practical compositions of the same class, ethical dissertations, letters of the kind in which A writes that B is a new Demosthenes, and B replies that A really is a second Plato. The Progymnasmata include all the kinds mentioned earlier in this chapter, fables and narrations, uses and sentences, encomia and ethopoiæ and the rest; the Meletæ range from the complaint of a parasite who has been done out of his dinner, through all manner of historical, mythical, and fantastic cases, to the question whether Lais (after being exiled) had not better be recalled as a useful member of society. But literary criticism is _nullibi_. If it were anywhere we should look for it in the comparison of Demosthenes and Æschines which figures among the _Progymnasmata_, in the _Life_[174] of the first-named orator and the arguments to his speeches, and perhaps in the _Apologia Socratis_. In the first there is not a _scintilla_ of the kind: the comparison wholly concerns the lives, characters, and successes of the two. In the _Apologia_ there is pretty constant reference to Socrates' conversation, with some to that of others, Prodicus, Protagoras, &c. But any literary consideration is avoided with that curious superciliousness, or more curious subterfuge, which we have noticed often already, and which is so rigid and so complete that it suggests malice prepense—a deliberate and perverse abstention. The “editorial” matter (to vary a happy phrase of M. Egger) on Demosthenes is even more surprisingly barren,—mere biography, and mere reference to the stock technicalities and classifications of _stasis_ and the like, practically exhaust it. I do not know how far the fact that he composed, in answer to Aristides,[175]