For the three centuries between Aristotle and Dionysius we are but ill provided with original texts. But both from what we have, and from such notices as are trustworthy, we can be tolerably sure that attention was almost entirely devoted, on the one side to the verbal or material criticism of the Alexandrian and Pergamene schools, on the other to technical Rhetoric. Now the former, though a most necessary ancilla to literary appreciation proper, is always to be kept in proper subordination to her mistress; and the conditions of the latter, though in one sense favourable to criticism (inasmuch as the stock of actual literature was always increasing, and the temptation to turn to it from mere declamation-making might at least be expected to be always stronger), was in itself becoming more and more a futile technique. Symbouleutic oratory (above vestry rank) was killed and kept dead by the petty tyrants, the less successors of Alexander, and lastly the Roman rule. Judicial Rhetoric tended to confine itself to minor causes. Only Epideictic, the most dangerous of the kinds, began to flourish more and more, and resulted by degrees, as we have seen, in the creation of a singular profession or pseudo-profession, the members of which had about them something of the travelling lecturer, something of the popular preacher, something—nay, a good deal—of the hack book-maker, and not a little of the journalist pure and simple. Their own study of literature, unless they kept to the stock passages of the textbooks, must have been fairly thorough; but literature was to them partly what Burton’s _Anatomy_ was to Captain Shandon, a mere dictionary of quotations, partly a collection of patterns. Very rarely did they take it by itself even for the canvas of one of their show-orations, and when they did it was seldom or never from the point of view of appreciation of strictly literary beauty.