The short “censures” of ancient writers have, perhaps, an interest of curiosity greater than their interest of value. It is [Sidenote: _Censures and Commentaries on Orators, &c._] not improbable that they served as a pattern to Quintilian, who often suggests a knowledge of Dionysius.[191] But though they are ushered in with some quite irreproachable commonplaces as to the excellence of contemplating excellent models, they are themselves, at least sometimes, too brief, and too specifically sententious, to have much intrinsic interest or much teaching power. We are not greatly advanced in the understanding of Hesiod, whether we have read him or not, by being told that he paid attention to pleasure, and the smoothness of words, and harmonious composition. Nor can any of the poetical labels of our Halicarnassian be said to be very much more informing, while in dramatic writers he does not go beyond “The Three,” and has little to tell us that is newer than the tolerably obvious things that Æschylus is magnificent in his language, Sophocles noble in his characterisation, Euripides questionable in both. The historians he treats at first in contrasted pairs—Herodotus and Thucydides, of course, Philistus and Xenophon,—then Theopompus alone. The philosophers he polishes off in a combined paragraph of a dozen lines, which hardly attempts to be characteristic save in the case of Aristotle. And then, with a half apology for so summarily despatching these, he turns, as to his proper business, to the orators. But even here we have mere summary, and must turn to the far fuller, but, unluckily, not quite complete, _Commentaries_ on the same subject. Footnote 191: See on this point Usener (_op. cit._), who would rather suppose a common indebtedness. The “censures” form the bulk of the fragments which he has published as περὶ μιμήσεως. Perhaps the best examples of really illuminative critical phrase in them are the “pugnacious roughness,” ἀγωνιστικὴ τραχύτης, ascribed to Antimachus, and the “combination of magnificence and terseness,” μεγαλοφυὲς καὶ βραχύ, to Alcæus. Of the shorter fragments the summary of the requirements of art as “a happy nature, exact study, and laborious practice” is good if not astonishing.