One may almost equally disagree with the _special_ criticism which serves as setting to the great jewel among the quotations [Sidenote: _On Sappho._] of the treatise, the so-called “Ode to Anactoria.” The charm of this wonderful piece consists, according to Longinus, in the skill with which Sappho chooses the accompanying emotions of “erotic mania.”[230] To which one may answer, “Hardly so,” but in the skill with which she expresses those emotions which she selects, and in the wonderful adaptation of the metre to the expression, in the mastery of the picture of the most favoured lover, drawing close and closer to the beloved to catch the sweet speech,[231] and the laughter full of desire. In saying this we should have the support of the Longinus of other parts of the treatise against the Longinus of this. Yet here, too, he is illuminative; here, too, the “noble error” of the Aristotelian conception of poetry distinguishes and acquits him. Footnote 230: Literal. Footnote 231: Fond and foolish fancy as it may be, there seems to me something miraculous in the mere juxtaposition of πλησίον and ἁδὺ—the silent adoring lover, jealous, as it were, of the very air robbing him of a portion of the sweetness. With the remarks on αὔξησις, “amplification,” as it is traditionally but by no means satisfactorily rendered, another phase [Sidenote: “_Amplification._”] of the critical disease of antiquity (which is no doubt balanced by other diseases in the modern critical body) may be thought to appear. Both in the definition of this figure and in the description of its method we may, not too suspiciously, detect evidences of that excessive technicality which gave to Rhetoric itself the exclusive title of _techne_. _Auxesis_, it seems, comes in when the business, or the point at issue, admits at its various stages of divers fresh starts and rests, of one great phrase being wheeled upon the stage after another, continually introduced in regular ascent.[232] This, it seems, can be done either by means of τοπηγορία, “handling of _topoi_ or commonplaces,” or by δείνωσις, which may perhaps be best rendered _tour de force_, or by cunning successive disposition (ἐποικονομία) of facts or feelings. For, says he, there are ten thousand kinds of _auxesis_. Footnote 232: ἕτερα ἑτέροις ἐπεισκυκλούμενα μεγέθη συνεχῶς ἐπεισάγηται κατ’ ἐπίβασιν.