“Again, he is wanting in ethical character and truth and nervousness of style (γοργότης.) Of sublimity, so far as it suits political discourses, he mixes a very good dose, and suitably to his clearness. But his style is more languid[263] than it ought to be. And he is not least blamed for attention to trifles, and a balancing of clauses[264] which disgusts. But we say this in reference to the excellence of his speeches, pointing out what fails, and is exceptional in them, inasmuch as in comparison with some of those who have made bold to write speeches, even his shortcomings would appear to be excellence.” Footnote 263: ἄτονος. Footnote 264: σμικρολογία καὶ τὸ προσκορὲς τιον παρισώσεων. It is needless to say that this προσκορὲς, this “satiated nausea” of the balanced antithetic sentence, has recurred as regularly as the resort to the most obvious, and, so long as it is fresh, most effective, of rhetorical devices. Immediately before this article on Isocrates there is a very shrewd note (and one which is “for thoughts” to any one who has ever written books) on the _Sophistike Paraskeue_ of Phrynichus. “This writer, if any ever was, is fullest of various knowledge, but otherwise redundant and garrulous: _for when it was open to him to have got the matter completely finished off, without missing a single important point, in not a fifth part of his actual length, he, by saying things out of season, has stretched it out to an unmanageable bulk; and while he has collected for others' use the matter of a good and suitable treatise, he cannot be said to have made much use of it himself_.” It would be possible to extend these excerpts and abstracts very considerably from my notes of reading the great mass of the _Bibliotheca_; though the larger part of that mass is itself made up, not of literary criticisms at all, but, as has been said, of summaries, abstracts, and extracts. In not a few cases the longest articles deal with commentaries or anthologies, the Platonic studies of the rhetorician Aristides, the _meletæ_ or declamations of Himerius, the _Bibliotheca_ of Diodorus, the fortunately still extant Commonplace-books of Stobæus, and the like. But the foregoing pages have probably given sufficient foundation for a study of the Photian position, which may be taken, without rashness, as a very favourable representative of Byzantine criticism generally.[265] Footnote 265: And it cannot be too often repeated that when Byzantine men of letters were not criticising they were often doing something better _for us_. He would be a sorry critic himself who would not give a wilderness of all but the very greatest members of his own class for John Stobæus or Constantine Cephalas.