Besides citing the _Orithyia_ passage John also refers to Longinus as admiring Moses (Walz, vi. 211), which, of course, strengthens the supposition that he had the Περὶ Ὕψους before him not a little (_v. supra_, pp. 156, 162). And so, without further minute examination of this curiosity, we may take some general view of it as the last words—or fairly representative of the last words—of Greek rhetorical criticism, unaffected by mediæval literature, unaffected even by Latin, to any considerable, or at least avowed, extent, but turning round and round the long-guarded treasures of its own special hoard, like the dragons of fable. To us, perhaps, the hoard does not seem very inviting. The enormous apparatus of distinction and terminology is set to work, almost exclusively, on matter which has neither the attraction of the highest æsthetic problems, nor the practical interest and profit of direct literary criticism of particulars. There is abundance of learning, and by no means a dearth of mother-wit. But the worst side of Scholasticism—the side which was long unjustly taken for the whole, but which _is_ a side thereof—makes itself almost universally felt. Sometimes one almost thinks of one of the keenest, if not the most generally delectable, strokes of Rabelaisian satire, the duel of signs between Panurge and Thaumast. This -_tes_ and that -_ia_ hurtle through the air almost without conveying understanding, though they may darken a good deal. With sufficient pains and goodwill, you may disinter many a shrewd remark, many a really useful definition, many a scrap of precious information, by no means unintelligently used. But on the whole, the impression is as of the ghost of Rhetoric struggling against being re-embodied as the soul of Criticism. INTERCHAPTER I. We have endeavoured, in the foregoing Book, to survey—from the actual texts, and admitting no conjectural or theoretical reconstruction—the history of literary criticism in Greece and the Greek Empire till its fall. It is our duty in this first halt to survey this survey—to see what results it actually gives us, to classify and arrange them, to account for them as philosophically as possible, and, without digressing into the quicksands of theory, to lay down the solid road of logical and historical perspective.