From a certain point of view, no critical writer of antiquity has a greater interest than the rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus. [Sidenote: _Dionysius of Halicarnassus._] It is true, of course, that this view is at once strictly limited and decidedly complex. As Dionysius is not even to be mentioned with Longinus for what may be called critical inspiration, so he falls simply out of sight when he is compared with Aristotle in point of authority, of method, and, above all, of that somewhat indirect and illegitimate, but real, importance which is derived from a long tradition. So, too, there is nothing in him of that “flash,” that illumination, which we still receive from the turning-on of the lamp of satiric genius to the critical field by Lucian, as long before by Aristophanes. But the treatise _On the Sublime_ is, after all, but an inestimable fragment: the loss to criticism, had the _Rhetoric_ and the _Poetics_ shared the fate of some others of their author’s works, would consist partly in the loss of what has been written about them and in following of them; while Aristophanes and Lucian are only critics at intervals and by accident. In Dionysius we have a critic by profession, and not merely a rhetorician, of whose critical work an assortment, varied in matter and considerable in bulk, survives, who had an evident love for his business, and whose talents for it were very much greater than some authorities seem willing to allow. It would be unnecessary to observe (if there were not a sort of persons who, in such cases, take the absence of mention for [Sidenote: _His works._] the presence of ignorance) that the work attributed to Dionysius, and his identity and unity as an author, have been subjected to the common processes of attempted disintegration. We are told, as usual, that the works are to be credited or debited not to one Dionysius, but to two or even three Dionysii or others; and that individual pieces must or may be split up into genuine and spurious parts. But this, besides that it is usual and inevitable, concerns us here little or not at all. Hardly anything that is about to be said would have to be altered, if it were quite certain that the critical works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus were the production of a whole club of contributors, or had accumulated as the successive productions of a family of rhetoricians, as long-lived and pertinacious in Rhetoric as the Monros of Edinburgh in another art or science. They consist, taking the order of the edition of Reiske,[186] of a treatise of some length on Composition in the literal sense of the putting together of words; of a set treatise on Rhetoric; of a collection of brief judgments on the principal authors in Greek, and another of much longer ones, which is unfortunately not complete, but which contains elaborate handlings of Lysias, Isocrates, Isæus, and Deinarchus; of a letter to a certain Ammæus, arguing that Demosthenes was not indebted to the rhetorical