But by far the most interesting thing in this context is Longinus' irreconcilable objection to a fanciful metaphor [Sidenote: _The “maidens in the eyes.”_] which, as it happens most oddly, was, with a very slight variation, an equal pet of the Greeks of the great age and of our own Elizabethans. Every reader of the latter knows the phrase, “to look babies in the eyes” of the beloved—that is to say, to keep the face so close to hers that the little reflections of the gazer in the pupils of her eyes are discernible. The Greek term for these little images, and the pupils that mirrored them, was slightly different—it was κόραι, maidens. And as, from the famous quarrel scene in Homer downwards, the eyes were always, in Greek literature, the seat of modesty or of impudence, the combination suggested, not merely to Timæus but even to Xenophon, a play of words, “more modest than the maidens in their eyes,” or conversely, as where Timæus, speaking of the lawless lust of Agathocles, says that he must have had “harlots” (πόρνας), not “maidens” (κόρας), in his eyes. And Longinus is even more angry or sad with Xenophon than with Timæus, as expecting more propriety from him. But whether we agree with him in detail or not, the inestimable passage, on the mere quest and craze for novelty, which [Sidenote: _The canon “Quod semper.”_] follows, more than reconciles us, as well as the other great saying in cap. vi. as to the “late-born” character of the judgment of style, and that in the next as to the canon of Sublimity being the effect produced unaltered in altered circumstances and cases. When we read these things we feel that literary criticism is at last fully constituted,—that it wants nothing more save greater variety, quantity, and continuance of literary creation, upon which to exercise itself. No nervous check or chill need be caused by the tolerably certain fact that more than one hole may be picked in the [Sidenote: _The sources of sublimity._] subsequent classification of the sources[228] of ὕψος. These attempts at an over-methodical classification (it has been said before) are always full of snares and pitfalls to the critic. Especially do they tempt him to the sin of arguing in a circle. It cannot be denied that in every one of the five divisions (except, perhaps, the valuable vindication of the quality of Passion) there is some treacherous word or other, which is a mere synonym of “sublime.” Thus in the first we have ἁδρεπήβολον, mastery of the ἅδρον, a curious word, the nearest equivalent of which in English is, perhaps, “stout” or “full-bodied,” as we apply these terms to wine; in the fourth γενναία, “noble,” which is only “sublime” in disguise; and in the fifth εν δε φαει και ολεσσον, of which much the same may be said. Footnote 228: