“John of Sicily” (Walz, vi. 225), who in the thirteenth century cites the lost φιλόλογοι ὁμιλίαι almost as if he was citing the Περὶ Ὕψους, is certainly no exception. The undated Byzantine (Cramer, _Anecd. Oxon._, iii. 159, quoted by Professor Roberts after Usener), who couples Λογγίνου κρίσεις with those of Dionysius, may come nearer, as may the anonymous scholiast on Hermogenes (Walz, vii. 963), who cites the ὁμιλίαι on τὸ στομφῶδες, “mouthing.” This detachment from any particular age—nay, more, this _vita fallens_, this unrecognised existence of a book so remarkable—stands in no merely fanciful relation to the characteristics of the book itself. It abides alone in thought as well as in history. That it is a genuine, if a late, production of the classical or semi-classical age we cannot reasonably doubt, for a multitude of reasons, small in themselves but strong in a bundle,—its style, its diction, its limitations of material, and even occasionally of literary view, its standards, all sorts of little touches like the remark about Cicero, and so forth. Yet it has, in the most important points, almost more difference from than resemblance to the views of classical critics generally. The much greater antiquity of Aristotle may be thought to make comparison with him infructuous, if not unfair. But we have seen already how far Longinus is from Dionysius, how much further from Plutarch; and we shall see in the next Book how far he is from Quintilian. Let us look where we will, to critics by profession or to critics by chance, to the Alexandrians as far as we know them, to the professional writers on Rhetoric, to Aristophanes earlier and Lucian later, always we see Longinus apart—among them by dispensation and time, but not of them by tone, by tendency, by temper.