The author commences by addressing a young friend or pupil, a certain Postumius (Terentianus or Florentianus?), on the inefficiency of the Treatise on the Sublime by a certain Cæcilius.[220] In endeavouring to provide something more satisfactory, especially as to the sources of Sublimity, he premises little more in the shape of definition than that it is “a certain consummateness and eminence” of words, completing this with the remark (the first epoch-making one of the treatise) that the effect of such things is “not persuasion but transport,”[221] not the result of skill, pains, and arrangement, but something which, “opportunely out-flung,”[222] carries everything before it. But can it be taught? Is it not innate? The doubt implies a fallacy. Nature is necessary, but it must be guided and helped by art. Then comes a gap, a specially annoying one, since the farther shore lands us in the midst of an unfavourable criticism of a passage supposed to come from the lost _Orithyia_ of Æschylus, which is succeeded by, or grouped with, other specimens of the false sublime, bombast, tumidity, and the _parenthurson_.[223] Next we pass to “frigidity,” a term which Longinus uses with a slightly different connotation from Aristotle’s, applying it chiefly to what he thinks undue flings and quips and conceits. These particular strictures are, in Chapter V., generalised off into a brief but admirable censure of the quest for mere novelty, of that “horror of the obvious” which bad taste at all times has taken for a virtue. To cure this and other faults, there is nothing for it but to make for the true Sublime, hard as it may be. For (again a memorable and epoch-making saying) “the judgment of words is the latest begotten fruit of many an attempt.”[224] Footnote 220: A Sicilian rhetor, probably of Calacte, said by Suidas to have been of Greek, or at any rate non-Roman, birth, and a Jew in religion. Dionysius knew him, and he lived in the time of Augustus. There was another (confused by Suidas) in that of Hadrian. This _may_ be our C. Footnote 221: οὐ γὰρ εἰς πειθὼ ἀλλ' ἐις ἔκστασιν ἄγει τὰ ὑπερφυᾶ. Footnote 222: καιρίως ἐξενεχθέν. Footnote 223: A phrase of the rhetor Theodorus, meaning “the thyrsus poked in at the wrong time,” “enthusiasm out of place.” Footnote 224: λόγων κρίσις πολλῆς ἐστι πείρας τελευταῖον ἐπιγέννημα. Dionysius (_v. supra_, pp. 130, 131) had said as much in sense, but less magisterially in phrase. I have translated λόγων in its narrowest equivalent, instead of “style” or “literature,” which it doubtless also means, in order to bring out the antithesis better. I have small doubt that Longinus meant, here as elsewhere, to fling back the old contempt of the opposition of “words” and “things.”