But these mischiefs, though sufficiently considerable, and assisted by the ignorance (changed latterly in the worse days to a contemptuous ignoring) of other languages, were by no means the equals of those caused directly by this ignorance, while they were aggravated by it in every way. If, while we are certainly not superior to the ancients in most branches of literature, where comparison is possible, we may challenge them more safely in criticism, it is due almost, if not quite wholly, to what has been called the illegitimate advantage of our possession of an infinitely larger stock of accumulated literature, and of the fact that this literature is distributed over the most various times, nations, and languages. It is the rarest thing at any time to find a critic of the first class who is not acquainted with literatures besides his own; and it is almost invariable to find that the mistakes which great critics make arise out of ignorance or forgetfulness of other literatures besides their own. But even in antiquity there is no critic of, or approaching, this first class, except Aristotle, who suffered the full exposure to this disability. As a “tongue of comparison” Longinus knew Latin: Dionysius and Quintilian, who, if not critics of the first class, are not far off it, knew, the one Latin, the other Greek. But Aristotle (unless the legends about Alexander having sent him Indian communications have any basis, and unless we take the references of Plato and others to Egyptian stories as having much more solid ground than there is any reason to accord them) had none, and could have had none: while, even if he had been stocked with Egyptian and Sanscrit, these would have done him but little good, though they might have corrected his delusions as to the necessary connection of poetry and fiction. It must always be reckoned as one of the most fatal proofs of the literary inferiority of the Roman genius that the younger literature, though it enjoyed the bilingual advantage to the full, made so little advance on the older in criticism.