In considering this inestimable book, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of these early words of it to which attention has been drawn above. The yoke of “persuasion” has at last been broken from the neck of the critic. He does not consider literature as something which will help a man to carry an assembly with him, to persuade a jury, to gain a declamation prize. He does indeed still mention the listener rather than the reader; but that is partly tradition, partly a consequence of the still existing prevalence of recitation or reading aloud. Further, it is sufficiently evident that the critic [Sidenote: _Preliminary Retrospect._] has come to regard literature as a whole, and is not distracted by supposed requirements of “invention” on the part of the poet, of “persuasion” on the part of the orator, and so forth. He looks at the true and only test of literary greatness—the “transport,” the absorption of the reader. And he sees as no one, so far as we know, saw before him (except Dionysius for a moment and “in a glass darkly”), as Dante was the only man after him to see for a millennium and much more, that the beautiful words, the “mots rayonnants,” are at least a main means whereby this effect is produced. Instead of style and its criticism being dismissed, or admitted at best with impatience as something φορτικόν, we have that gravest and truest judgment of the latter as the latest-born offspring of many a painful endeavour. Far is it indeed from him to stick to the word only: his remarks on novelty, his peroration (not intended as such, but so coming to us), and many other things, are proof of that. But in the main his criticism is of the pure æsthetic kind, and of the best of that kind. It will not delay us too much to examine it a little more in detail. The opening passage as to Cæcilius, though it has tempted some into perilous hypothetic reconstructions of that critic’s [Sidenote: _Detailed Criticism: The opening._] possible teaching, really comes to little more than this—that Longinus, like most of us, was not exactly satisfied with another man’s handling of his favourite subject. And, curiously enough, the only specific fault that he here finds—namely, that his predecessor, while illustrating the nature of the Sublime amply, neglected to discuss the means of reaching it—rather recoils on himself. For there can be little doubt that the weakest part of the Περὶ Ὕψους is its discussion of “sources.” But the great phrase, already more than once referred to, as to transport or ecstasy, not persuasion, lifts us at once—itself transports us—into a region entirely different from that of all preceding Rhetorics, without at the same time giving any reason to fear loss of touch with the common ground and common-sense. For nothing can be saner than the handling, in the second chapter, of that _aporia_ concerning nature and art, genius and painstaking, which has not infrequently been the cause of anything but sane writing.