Amidst all this desert and chaos of wasted industry there stands the great rock of the Περὶ Ὕψους with its shade and refreshment in the weary land of its own contemporaries, and with its brow catching the dawn which was not to shine fully for more than fifteen hundred years, and is hardly noon-day yet. In the section devoted to it we have examined, as thoroughly as our limits permitted, the special merits and defects of this great little book; it is only necessary here to lay a slight additional stress on the fact that if it be not the sole book of antiquity—the sole book, except Dante’s, of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the earlier modern times—to set forth that critical ideal which comprehends the formal and the material, the verbal and the ideal merits of literature, it exhibits this comprehension as no other book does. To confine ourselves to our present special subject—the criticism of Greek antiquity—Plato may alternate noble flights with curious crotchets about literature; Aristophanes may criticise from the point of view of robust common-sense which is yet not in the least Philistine; Aristotle may have almost a mathematical grasp of his own notions of form, and a generous enthusiasm for certain kinds of dignity in subject and proportion; Dionysius may show that adherence to technique (and a rather vicious technique too) is quite compatible with genuine literary appreciation. But all these, and much more others, have their eyes mainly off the object. Aristotle himself at times, lesser men like Plutarch, who have misread their Plato, continually, seem to think it rather vain to look at that object at all. The intelligent enjoyment of literature; the intimacy with it, at once voluptuous and intellectual; the untiring, though it may be never fully satisfied, quest after the secret of its charms, never neglecting the opportunity of basking and revelling in them—these things, till we come to Longinus, are rare indeed. And when we do meet them, the rencontre is of a sort of accidental and shamefaced character. When we come to Longinus there is no more false modesty. “Beautiful words are the light of thought.” These words themselves are the lantern of criticism.