After the gap, however, we come to one of the passages recently glanced at, and mentioned or to be mentioned so [Sidenote: _The stricture on the_ Orithyia.] often elsewhere, which warn us as to difference of view. The passage, supposed to be, as we said, Æschylean and from the _Orithyia_, is no doubt at rather more than “concert-pitch.” It is Marlowe rather than Shakespeare; yet Shakespeare himself has come near to it in _Lear_ and elsewhere, and one line at least— μίαν παρείρας πλεκτάνην χειμάρῥοον— is a really splendid piece of metre and phrase, worthy, high-pitched as it is, of the author of the _Oresteia_ and the _Prometheus_ at his very best. So, too, the much-enduring Gorgias would hardly have received very severe reprehension from any but the extremest precisians of modern criticism, at its most starched time, for calling vultures “living tombs.” But the horror of the Greeks on the one hand for anything extravagant, bizarre, out of measure, on the other for the slightest approach in serious work to the unbecoming, the unpleasantly suggestive, makes Longinus here a very little prudish. And his general remarks are excellent, especially in reference to τὸ παρένθυρσον, which I have ventured to interpret, not quite in accordance with the general rendering, “the poking in of the thyrsus at the wrong time,” the affectation of Bacchanalian fury where no fury need be. But we still have the same warning in the chapter on Frigidity, coupled with another—that, perhaps, as sometimes happens, Longinus' sense of humour was not quite [Sidenote: _Frigidity._] equal to his sense of sublimity, and yet another—that the historic sense, so late developed everywhere, was, perhaps, not very strong in him. We, at least, should give Timæus the benefit of a doubt, as to the presence of a certain not inexcusable irony in the comparison (in which, for instance, neither Swift nor Carlyle would have hesitated to indulge) of the times taken by Alexander to conquer Asia and by Isocrates to write the _Panegyric_. On the other hand, he seems to forget the date of Timæus when he finds the μικροχαρές, the paltrily funny, in the historian’s connection of the Athenian Hermocopidæ and their punishment by Hermocrates, the son of Hermon. There is no reason why Timæus should not have been quite serious, though in the third century after Christ, and even in the first, the allusion might seem either a tasteless freethinking jest or a silly piece of superstition.