And then there is the curious Conclusion which, as we have said, is no conclusion at all, as it would seem, and which yet has [Sidenote: _The Conclusion._] an unmistakable air of “peroration, with [much] circumstance,” on the everlasting question, “Why is the Sublime so rare in our time?” In that day, as in this, we learn (the fact being, as in King Charles II.'s fish-experiment, taken for granted), divers explanations, chiefly political, were given for the fact. Democracy was a good nurse of greatness: aristocracy was not. But Longinus did not agree. It was money-getting and money-seeking, pleasure-loving and pleasure-hunting, he thought. Plain living and high thinking must be returned to if the Heights were to be once more scaled. A noble conclusion, if perhaps only a generous fallacy. Had Longinus had our illegitimate prerogative-_post_rogative of experience, he would have known that the blowing of the wind of the spirit admits of no such explanations as these. Ages of Liberty and Ages of Servitude, Ages of Luxury and Ages of Simplicity, Ages of Faith and Ages of Freethought—all give us the Sublime if the right man is there: none will give it us if he is not. But our critic had not the full premisses before him, and we could not expect the adequate conclusion. Yet how great a book have we here! Of the partly otiose disputes about its date and origin and authorship one or two things are worth recalling, though for other purposes than those of the disputants. Let it be remembered that it is not quoted, or even referred to, by a single writer of antiquity.[240] There is absolutely no evidence for it, except its own internal character, before the date of its oldest manuscript, which is assigned to the tenth century. Even if, assuming it to be the work of Longinus, we suppose it to have been part of one of the works which _are_ ascribed to him (a possible assumption, see note), there is still the absence of quotation, still the absence even of reference to views so clearly formulated, so eloquently enforced, and in some ways so remarkably different from those of the usual Greek and Roman rhetorician. That the book can be of very late date—much later, that is to say, than that of Longinus himself—is almost impossible. One of its features, the lack of any reference to even a single writer later than the first century, has indeed been relied upon to prove that it is not later itself than that date. This is inconclusive for that purpose. But it makes every succeeding century less and less probable, while the style, though in some respects peculiar, is not in the least Byzantine. Footnote 240: