There are two ways to Rhetoric (see Cebes on another matter). One (to cut short the abundant and agreeable “chaff” of which, here as elsewhere, Lucian is so prodigal) is the long, troublesome, and ungrateful imitation of the mighty men of antiquity, of Plato and Demosthenes and the rest. The other, dealt with more copiously and more ironically still, is quite different. You learn a few fashionable catchwords for ordinary use, and some precious archaisms for occasional ornament; you must get rid of all bashfulness, dress yourself very well, cultivate the vices which happen to be in vogue, or at any rate pretend to them, and keep a good deal of company with women and servants, for both are babblesome and seldom at a loss. There is nothing hard in this and other precepts; and if you observe them, you will soon become a famous orator. Very good fun all of it, and very shrewd “criticism of life,” no doubt, but only distantly connected with criticism of literature. Yet it requires no hazardous conjecture to discern a very considerable literary critic in Lucian, and to discover the [Sidenote: _His critical limitations._] reason why that critic did not come out in himself or in his contemporaries, unless we are to rank the lonely and magnificent personality of Longinus among these. There was interesting literature in Lucian’s time—it is enough to mention the name of Apuleius to establish that proposition—but hardly any of it was exactly great, and the best of it was marred, either by the negative tendency which is one side of despair of greatness, or else by the hectic colours of decadence, or by the dubious struggles of new tendencies not yet quite ready to be born. Lucian himself (at any rate, after that youth of which we know so little) inclined, it is not necessary to say, to the negative side. He was distinctly deficient in enthusiasm (with which, perhaps, the critical artist can dispense as little as the creative), and had small feeling for poetry. His admiration for the great Attic prose writers, and its result in his own delightful style, are obvious enough; while the justice, if also the rigour, of his onslaughts on the characteristics most opposed to theirs, the characteristics of florid, “conceited,” neologistic prose and verse, cannot be denied. But the unsatisfactory negation of his religious and philosophical criticism extends also to his literary attitude. “Cannot you,” one feels inclined to say, “find something to say _for_ as well as against luxuriance of fancy, wealth of colour, delicate suggestiveness of thought and phrase?” Cannot you, like Longinus, admit that Nature meant men to think and write magnificently of the magnificent? He could not, or he would not: his very interest in literature as literature seems to have been lukewarm. And so the greatest writer of all the later Greeks, a writer great enough to rank with all but the very greatest of the earlier, gives us very little but carping criticism of literature, and not much