Plato, inserted (with some on the historians) in the letter to Cnæus Pompey, this is principally due to that horror of poetic prose, of dithyrambic expression, which (perhaps for better reasons than we know) was then creeping over criticism, and which we shall find dominant in critical, though not in popular, estimate during the earlier centuries of the Roman Empire. The second epistle to Ammæus seems to be one of the latest of the numerous utterances of Dionysius on the great Athenian historian. It is somewhat meticulous and verbal; but it is curious that the just-mentioned horror of gorgeousness reappears in it. And so we come to the famous onslaught in form against the son of Olorus. It is introduced by a somewhat elaborate [Sidenote: _The judgment of Thucydides._] apology—the critic going so far as to shelter himself under the leading case of Aristotle _v._ Plato. Thence he passes to a short sketch of the predecessors of Thucydides in history, commends him for dropping their fables, &c., but soon settles down to a regular _éreintement_—a “slating” criticism of the familiar type, wherein the desire to “dust the varlet’s jacket” is evidently not merely superior but anterior to any desire whatsoever to criticise varlet or jacket on the merits of either. The division into winters and summers, the setting forth of the causes of the war, the conduct and details of the story, the speeches—all come in for reprehension. But Dionysius is, as we should expect from his other handlings, much kinder to the style, though he objects to its occasional obscurity, urges difficulties on the score of the Figures, criticises some passages at great length, and ends by noticing the chief of the historian’s imitators, among whom he includes Demosthenes. On the whole, the article (as we may call it), though one-sided, is less so than some current descriptions of it may have conveyed to those who have not read it. But still it belongs to the class of critiques indicated above, a class in which few of the best examples of criticism are to be found, except from the point of view of those who hold the true business of that art to be, like the “backward voice” of Trinculo-Caliban, “to utter foul speeches and to detract.”