He is wrong, undoubtedly wrong—we may swear it boldly by those who fell in Lyonnesse, and in the palace of Atli, and under the echoes of the horn of Roland. The _Odyssey_ is not less than the _Iliad_; it is different. But we can hardly quarrel with him for being wrong, because his error is so instructive, so interesting. We see in it first (even side by side with not a little innovation) that clinging to the great doctrines of old, to the skirts of Aristotle and of Plato, which is so often found in noble minds and so seldom in base ones. And we see, moreover, that far as he had advanced—near as he was to an actual peep over the verge of the old world and into the new—he was still a Greek himself at heart, with the foibles and limitations—no despicable foibles and limitations—of the race. Here is the instinctive unreasoning terror of the unknown Romance; the dislike of the vague and the fabulous; even that curious craze about Character being in some way inferior to Action, which we have seen before. By the time of Longinus—if he lived in the third century certainly, if he lived in the first probably—the romance did exist. But it was looked upon askance; it had no regular literary rank; and a sort of resentment was apparently felt at its daring to claim equality with the epic. Now the _Odyssey_ is the first, and not far from the greatest, of romances. It has the Romantic Unity in the endurance and triumph of its hero. It has the Romantic Passion in the episodes of Circe and Calypso and others: above all, it has the great Romantic breadth, the free sweep of scene and subject, the variety, the contrast of fact and fancy, the sparkle and hurry and throb. But these things, to men trained in the admiration of the _other_ Unity, the _other_ Passion, the more formal, regulated, limited, measured detail and incident of the usual tragedy and the usual epic—were at best unfamiliar innovations, and at worst horrible and daring impieties. Longinus will not go this length: he cannot help seeing the beauty of the _Odyssey_. But he must reconcile his principles to his feelings by inventing a theory of decadence, for which, to speak frankly, there is no critical justification at all.