To illustrate what is meant, let us take a book which every one who makes such an attempt as this must mention with the utmost gratitude and respect, the admirable _Essai sur l'Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs_[3] of the late M. Egger. That excellent scholar and most agreeable writer was perhaps as free from “hariolation” as any one who has ever dealt with classical subjects; yet the first ninety pages of his book are practically in the air. The judges of rhapsodical competitions were the first critics; the Homeric edition of Pisistratus presupposes and implies criticism, which is equally—which is even more—presupposed and implied in the choragic system of Athens, whereby plots were chosen for performance; there are known to have been successive and corrected versions of plays, from which the same conclusions may be drawn. We are told, and can readily believe, that the actors had their parts suited to them, and this means criticism. Nay, was not the [Sidenote: _Illustration from M. Egger._] whole Comedy, the Old Comedy at least, a criticism, and often a purely literary one? Is not the _Frogs_, in particular, a dramatised “review” of the most slashing kind? And have we not even the titles, at least, of regular treatises, presumably critical, by Pratinas, by Lasus, by the great Sophocles himself? Footnote 3: Paris. Third Edition, #1887. Now all this is probable; nearly all of it is interesting, and some of it is, so far as it goes, certain. But then as a certainty it goes such a very little way! M. Egger himself, with the frankness which the scholar ought to have, but has not always, admits the justice of the reproach of one of his critics, that part of it is conjecture. It would scarcely be harsh to say that all of it is, in so far as any solid information as to the critical habits of the Greeks is furnished by it. In the pages that follow at least a steady effort will be made to discard the conjectural altogether, and to reduce even the amount of superstructure on [Sidenote: _The Documents._] second-hand foundations to the minimum. The extant written word, as it is the sole basis of all sound criticism in regard to particulars, so it is the only sound basis for the history of Criticism in general. The enormous losses which we have suffered in this department of Greek literature, and the scanty supply which, except in the department of the Lower Rhetoric, seems to be all that existed in Latin, may appear to make the effort to conduct inquiry in this way a rash or a barren one; but the present writer at least is convinced that no effort can usefully be made in any other. And after [Sidenote: _Greek._] all, though so much is lost, much remains. In point of tendency we can ask for nothing better than Plato, provoking and elusive as he may seem in individual utterances; in point of particular expression and indication of general lines, the _Rhetoric_ and the _Poetics_ of Aristotle are admittedly priceless; and such