These, addressed to his favourite correspondent Ammæus, begin with the familiar complaint (which no critical experience of the past ever drives from a critic’s mouth) about the badness of the literary times. The good old Attic Muse herself, like a neglected wife, is insulted, deprived of her rights, and even menaced in her existence, by impudent foreign baggages, Phrygian, or Carian, or Barbarian out and out. But we are rather surprised (till we remember that Dionysius was a settler at Rome, and that it was his interest, if not to do as the Romans did, at any rate to please them) to hear that things are improving, owing to the good sense of the governors of the Roman state, itself the governess of the world. There is some hope that this “senseless eloquence will not last for another generation.”[192] And Dionysius will do what he can to help the good work by a study of the six greatest of the old Attic orators, Lysias, Isocrates, Isæus, Demosthenes, Hyperides, Æschines. Unluckily we only have the first three of these, though a judgment of Deinarchus, not promised, exists, and the _De Admiranda Vi_ supplies the gap, as far as Demosthenes goes, in even fuller measure than in proportion to the others. We may as well take these and other things together, in order to have something like a conspectus of the case before summing up the critical characteristics of this most interesting critic. Footnote 192: Petronius found that it did! If they are somewhat disappointing, this (to borrow the convenient bull) is not much more than we might have expected. [Sidenote: _The minor works._] The _De Admiranda Vi_ is by far the best of them, and contains a great deal of excellent criticism, both particular and general. But the orators had already for centuries been the very parade-ground of Rhetoric; and as paradoxical excursions from orthodox limits were, though by no means unknown to the ancients, not in great favour with them, everything that was likely to be said of the Ten was trite and hackneyed. The smaller epistles and the judgment of Thucydides (perverse as this last exploit is) are, on the whole, more interesting. The little paper on the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle and the Speeches of Demosthenes, arguing that the latter are anterior to the former, is of a kind with which modern times are only too familiar, but displays none of the puerility and false logic which, in our modern instances, that familiarity has taught us to associate with the kind. The contention is undoubtedly sound: the handling is reasonable, and the whole makes us distinctly sorry that Dionysius, who had access to so much that we have lost, did not write a complete _History of Greek Literature_, which would have been invaluable, instead of his _History of Rome_, which we could have done without, though it is far from valueless. As it is, this is one of the few important contributions to such a history that we possess, of really ancient date. If he is less happy in the judgment of