But all this is a digression,[238] and the author seems to have [Sidenote: _Hyperboles._] returned to his Metaphors (in a gap where the demon has interfered with less malice than usual), and to Hyperboles, under the head of which we get a useful touch of contempt for Isocrates.[239] We are in deeper and more living waters when we come to the handling, alas! too brief (though nothing seems here to be lost), of _ordonnance_, “composition,” selection and arrangement of words. Here is yet another of those great law-making phrases which are the charter of a new criticism. “Harmony is to men not only physically connected with persuasion and pleasure, but a wonderful instrument of magniloquence and passion.” It may be difficult for us, with our very slight knowledge (it would, perhaps, be wiser to say almost absolute ignorance) of Greek pronunciation, to appreciate his illustrations here in detail. But we can appreciate the principle of them exactly, and apply that principle, [Sidenote: “_Harmony._”] in any language of which we do know the pronunciation, with perfect ease and the completest success. The silly critics (they exist at the present day) who pooh-pooh, as niceties and fiddle-faddle, the order of words, the application of rhythmical tests to prose, and the like, are answered here beforehand with convincing force by a critic whom no one can possibly charge with preferring sound to sense. Footnote 238: I must be allowed to say that it contains one of the most ambitious and successful passages of Longinus as an original writer—the vindication of Nature’s command to man to admire the magnificent—in cap. xxxv. It is a temptation to quote it. Footnote 239: οὐκ οἴδ’ ὅπως παιδὸς πρᾶγμα ἔπαθεν διὰ τὴν τοῦ πάντα αὐξητικῶς ἐθέλειν λὲγειν φιλοτιμίαν. This refers to prose, but the following chapter carries out the same principle as to poetry with equal acuteness. Longinus, great as his name is, probably is but little in the hands of those who object (sometimes almost with foam at the mouth) to the practice of analysing the mere harmonic effect of poetry. But it is pleasant to think of these passages when one reads the outcries, nor is the pleasantness rendered less pleasant by the subsequent cautions against that over-rhythmical fashion of writing which falls to the level of mere dance-music. The caution against over-conciseness and over-prolixity is rather more of a matter of course, and the strictures on the μικρότης, occasionally to be found in Herodotus, like some in the earlier parts of the treatise, sometimes elude us, as is the case with similar verbal criticisms even in languages with which we are colloquially familiar.