For though he himself was almost certainly unconscious of it, and might even have denied the fact with some warmth if it had [Sidenote: _Modernity of the treatise,_]. been put to him, Longinus has marked out grounds of criticism very far from those of the ancient period generally, further still from those which were occupied by any critic (except Dante) of the Middle Ages and the Classical revival, and close to, if not in all cases overlapping the territory of, the modern Romantic criticism itself. As we have seen, the ancient critic was wont either to neglect the effect of a work of art altogether, and to judge it by its supposed agreement with certain antecedent requirements, or else, if effects were considered at all, to consider them from the merely practical point of view, as in the supposed persuasive effect of Rhetoric, or from the ethical, as in the purging, the elevating, and so forth, assigned to Tragedy, and to Poetry generally. Longinus has changed all this. It is the enjoyment, the transport, the carrying away of the reader or auditor, that, whether expressedly or not, is always at bottom the chief consideration with him. He has not lowered the ethical standard one jot, but he has silently refused to give it precedence of the æsthetic; he is in no way for lawlessness, but he makes it clear, again and again, that mere compliance with law, mere fulfilment of the requirements of the stop-watch and the hundredth-of-an-inch rule, will not suffice. Aristotle had been forced, equally by his system and his sense, to admit that pleasure was an end—perhaps the end—of art; but he blenches and swerves from the consequences. Longinus faces them and follows them out. In his attention to rhythm, especially of prose, Longinus is much less unique, for this point (as we have seen and shall see) was never neglected by the best ancient critics. But there is again something particularly distinguishing in his attempt to trace the sources of the literary pleasure in specimen passages. The ancient tendency is, though not universally, yet too generally, the other way, to select specimen passages merely as illustrations of general rules.