If the word Byzantine is not quite such a byword as it once was, it still has for the most part an uncomplimentary connotation. How far that connotation is justified in reference to our special subject can hardly be better set forth than by exposition of three books of the middle and later Byzantine period.[242] The first shall be the remarkable and in a way famous _Bibliotheca_[243] of Photius in the ninth century; the second, the _Homeric Allegories_ of Tzetzes in the twelfth; the third, that commentary on the περὶ ἰδέων of Hermogenes by John the Siceliote in the thirteenth, which preserves to us our earliest reference to what is almost certainly the Περὶ Ὕψους, and assigns it to Longinus. Footnote 242: Of course many, perhaps most, of the commentators and scholiasts referred to in chaps. iv. and v. are Byzantine in date. Footnote 243: Ed. Bekker. Berlin, 1824. 2 vols. 4to, but paged continuously. The first is in its way unique. The author, it may be barely necessary to say, was Patriarch of Constantinople for a period [Sidenote: _Photius._] of nearly thirty years, though with an interval of ten, during which he was deposed or deprived (858-867, 877-886), in the latter half of the ninth century. He was originally a lay statesman, and, from causes no doubt political as well as religious, was much engaged in the disputes which led to the final separation between the Eastern and Western Churches. His birth- and death-dates are not known; but he was, in the year last mentioned—886—banished by Leo VI. to a monastery in Armenia. The _Bibliotheca_ purports to be an account or review of books read during an embassy to Assyria, written for the benefit, and at the request, of the author’s brother Tarasius. There is no reason for questioning the excellent Patriarch’s veracity; but if he actually took with him the two hundred and eighty authors (some of them very voluminous) whom he summarises, he must have had one of the largest travelling libraries on record. The form is encyclopædic, each author having a separate article beginning Ἀνεγνώθη, “there was read:” and to a great extent these articles consist of summaries of the matter of the books. This, as it happens, is fortunate. Photius seems to have had a special fancy for giving _précis_ of narrative, whether ostensibly historical or avowedly fictitious; and he has thus preserved for us all or almost all that we know of things so interesting as the _Persica_ of Ctesias, and the _Babylonica_ or _Sinonis and Rhodanes_ of the romancer Iamblichus. Naturally enough, a good deal of his matter is theological, and his abstracts here are seasoned with a sometimes piquant, but seldom strictly critical, animus. But he by no means confines himself to mere summary, and we have in his book what we have nowhere else—a sort of critical review of a very large portion of Greek literature. Pretty full abstract after his own manner, and some extract of this, will be the