If an example be required between Photius and John, it may be found (of no encouraging character) in the almost contemptible [Sidenote: _Tzetzes._] _Homeric Allegories_ of Tzetzes[268] written in that dreary “political” verse, the only consolation of which is the remembrance that, whether as origin or echo, it has sometimes been connected with the charming _Meum est propositum_ metre of the Latin Middle Ages. In Tzetzes, the allegorical method neither reaches its pinnacle of fantasticality as in the _Romance of the Rose_,—there is often something faintly fascinating there,—nor attains to the rather imposing mazes and meanderings of fifteenth-century personification, but stumbles along in pedestrian gropings of this kind[269] (on _Il._ i. 517 _sq._): “The groaning of Zeus signifieth a puff of wind moving the eyebrows of him, and conducting the thickness of clouds. The downcoming of Thetis indicates that there was rain, which is also a kind of consentment of assistance. And the coming of Zeus to his own home is the restoration of the atmosphere to its former condition, having thinned out the thickness of the cloud to rain. The rising up of the gods from their seats is the confusion and disturbance of the elements,” &c., &c. The much-ridiculed allegorical morals of the _Gesta Romanorum_ are sense, poetry, piety, to this ineffably dull and childish attempt to substitute a cheap pseudo-scientific Euhemerism for the criticism of literature. If Allegory had not too profitably assisted at the cradle of Greek literature, she certainly infested its death-bed in her most decrepit and malignant aspect. Footnote 268: Ed. Boissonade, Paris, 1851. Footnote 269: Ed. cit., p. 81, l. 299 _sq._ At the same time, we must not be too contemptuous of Byzantine criticism. Had the vast mass of the later rhetorical [Sidenote: _John the Siceliote._] scholiasts yielded nothing to the sifting but the quotation in John the Siceliote (though as from the _Philological Homilies_, not the Περὶ Ὕψους), by name, of the Longinian censure on the _Orithyia_, it would almost be justified in existing, not to mention references in others, one of which shows us that in the same collection Longinus gave a discussion (the tendency of which we can easily guess) on the _stomphodes_ or “mouthy.”[270] But the siftings are not quite limited to these two. Footnote 270: _V. supra_, p. 171 _note_.