To say this is of course not to give unmitigated and indisputable praise. There is no lack of advocates of the devil who will say that the reviewer’s point of view is not easily found in a very original age, or by a very original genius. It may be so—the age of Photius himself was certainly not a very original age, except in countries where the point of view of the reviewer was as certainly quite unknown. But this is not the question for us; the question for us is, Have we met this attitude? Have we come upon any one occupying this point of view before? And the answer must, I think, be, “No; we have not.” Dionysius, of all our writers, comes nearest to it, for Quintilian is too summary, and Longinus is considering rather a single quality of literature, as shown in divers authors, than divers authors by themselves, and as presenting a combination of qualities in each case. What we would give almost anything for is a collection of such reviews by Aristotle; and we have not got them. We do not know that Aristotle ever thought of such a thing,[266] though he might well have made it as a preparation for the _Rhetoric_ and the _Poetics_, just as he made his collection of “polities” as a preparation for the _Politics_. Footnote 266: Unless, which one would rather not think, he meant the _Problems_ (_v. supra_ p. 49 _sq._) as such. The absence of poetical criticism from Photius is specially to be regretted, because it leaves us in doubt as to his power of recognising and analysing, not merely the finer subtleties of form, but the more complex and interesting kinds of literary matter. His own interests, it is pretty clear, were, though he had the liking for novels which is often found in men of science and business, chiefly scientific, historical, and philosophical, including, of course, religion in philosophy. There is probably no Greek writer, whose subject in any way admitted of it, who has said so little about Homer. In dealing with Stobæus he has the patience (though, as has been seen, he is far from being a mere enumerator) to enumerate all the heads of the _Florilegium_ and the _Eclogæ_, and all the authors, hundreds of them as there are, whom the anthologist has laid under contribution. But he is tempted into no critical asides about them. He is essentially positive—frankly busied with matter, or with the more material side of form.