For about half a century before and a century after the Christian era the record, even putting Latin criticism aside altogether, is a more distinct one. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, and Dion Chrysostom, give us a good deal more material than we have yet had. But the results of the inspection of it are not wholly satisfactory. Dionysius of Halicarnassus is, as has been said, perhaps our typical specimen of the literary critic of antiquity. He has far less force and method and originality than Aristotle; but then he is a student confining himself to Rhetoric and History, not a world-philosopher, taking up the philosophy of literature merely as part of a whole. He has far less genius than Longinus; but he is also far more copiously preserved. We read him with respect; we meet just and acute observations in him, we can even occasionally compliment him on something like (never quite) the “grasp” of the comic fragment. But he is still partly under the limitations of his technical rhetoric, partly under others less easy to describe exactly; and he neglects Latin literature, by his time a very considerable entity. He cannot wholly bring himself to regard literature as literature. With Plutarch the case is much worse, for it is evident that he will not do this at all. It is an educating and ethical influence; a convenient storehouse of fact and example; a respectable profession; but not a great, a sovereign, and an infinitely delightful art. As for Dion (the most literary of the pure rhetoricians, and a favourable example of them), he is only an entertainer, the showman of another art, which is not quite coarse, but is certainly not in the highest sense fine. Lucian, somewhat later, is a true artist, a true man of letters, and occasionally a critic, endowed with unerring eyes and the very Sword of Sharpness itself, but he is this only at times, and even at those times he is too negative.