If we advance a little in point of time and turn our attention to the strict teaching and practice of Rhetoric itself, from the second century onward, and probably backward almost to the very time of Aristotle, the spectacle is even less satisfactory. The work, of which Hermogenes and Aphthonius are the coryphæi, leading an innumerable chorus of followers and commentators, who continue for more than a thousand years, is not exactly contemptible work. Work conducted with extreme diligence and also, at any rate in some cases, with remarkable alertness and acuteness of mind, can never be wholly contemptible. But it is work disappointing, unsatisfying, and even irritating to the last degree. The technical Rhetoric, always arbitrarily limited in subject and perversely conventional in method, has practically lost all chance of exercising itself in the noblest of its three divisions. Deliberative oratory is dead, except in exercises and make-believes, and the bread-winning chicanery of forensic, the frivolities (hollow except as also bread-winning) of epideictic, have usurped the whole room. It might be thought that in this bereaved condition the art would bethink itself of that profitable, dignified and delightful application which it had always more or less directly practised, but which had seemed less dignified than Persuasion—the art of literary criticism proper. But it does nothing—or but little—of the kind. The remarks of Hermogenes on Frigidity are not bad; the doubtful Demetrius, in his study of Interpretation, is not far from the true kingdom others approach it here and there. The invention of that critical “lingo,” to which reference has more than once been made, is something, though a something liable to abuse, and capable of standing in the way of better things. But, on the whole, the endless procession of some fifty generations, from the author of the _Rhet. ad Alex._ to John of Sicily, busies itself either on the one hand with endless distinctions, systematisations, and terminologies, with everlastingly twining strands of new colour into the rope that lets down the bucket into the empty well, and varying the staves and hoops of the bucket itself; or on the other with the provision of cut-and-dried patterns for the use of the brainless, with telling tongue-tied sophists what they are to say at the funeral of a fifth cousin, and how to make the most of a harbour which is dry for three-quarters of every tide.