The first canon of sublimity is not unlike the famous _Quod Semper_, &c. If a thing does not transport _at all_, it is certainly not Sublime. If its transporting power fails with repetition, with submission to different but still competent judges, it is not sublime. When men different in habits, lives, aims, ages, speech, agree about it, then no mistake is possible. The sources of Sublimity are next defined as five in number: Command of strong and manly thought; Vehement and enthusiastic passion—these are congenital; Skilfulness with Figures; Nobility of phrase; Dignified and elevated _ordonnance_.[225] These, after a rebuke of some length to Cæcilius for omitting Passion, he proceeds to discuss seriatim. The ἁδρεπήβολον, which he now calls “great-naturedness,”[226] holds the first place in value as in order, and examples of it, and of the failure to reach it, are given from many writers, Homer and “the Legislator of the Jews” being specially praised. This laudation leads to one of the best known and most interesting passages of the whole book, a short criticism and comparison of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, whereon, as on other things in this abstract, more hereafter. The interest certainly does not sink with the quotation from Sappho, whether we agree or not (again _vide post_) that the source of its charm is “the selection and composition of her details.” Other typical passages are then cited and criticised. Footnote 225: This word, which has the stamp of Dryden, is often preferable to “composition.” Footnote 226: τὸ μεγαλοφυές. We next come to Amplification,—almost the first evidence in the treatise, and not a fatal one, of the numbing power of “Figures.” Longinus takes occasion by it for many illuminative animadversions, not merely on Homer, but on Plato, Herodotus, Demosthenes, and Thucydides, whom (it is very satisfactory to observe) he includes among those who have “sublimity.” This handling of Figures, professedly eclectic, is fertile in such animadversions in regard to others besides Amplification—Hyperbata, Polyptota, Antimetathesis, and others still—with especial attention to Periphrasis, to his praise of which the eighteenth century perhaps attended without due attention to his cautions. Then comes another of the flashes of light. Dismissing the figures, he turns to diction in itself, and has a wonderful passage on it, culminating in the dictum, “For beautiful words are in deed and in fact the very light of the spirit,”[227]—the Declaration of Independence and the “Let there be light” at once of Literary Criticism. Footnote 227: φῶς γὰρ τῷ ὄντι ἵδιον τοῦ νοῦ τὰ καλὰ ὁνόματα.