Elsewhere it gleams more faintly; though it would be as ungrateful as it would be Philistine to ignore the debt which we owe to others, from Aristotle himself downwards. It is characteristic of Greek criticism—and it is the secret of its weakness as well as of its strength—that it is more busy with kinds than with authors, with authors than with books. And when it is busy with authors at all, it is hardly ever busy with them as wholes, as phenomena occupying an individual place in the literary cosmos; but almost always as examples of this or that quality, as supplying illustrations of this or that Figure, as giving a good pattern for such-and-such a progymnasma, a model for dealing with such-and-such a stasis. Proceeding in this way, criticism attempts—and fails—to be scientific; it renounces its right to be artistic, and effects the renunciation. The individual _ethos_ of the poet, the more solid but not less individual _ethos_ of the proseman, flies off and melts away, when each is merely regarded as an example of “_todetes_” or “_tallotes_” as a lecturer’s cabinet, in which you put your hand to draw out an illustration of Anadiplosis or Palillogia. Almost may the most idealist of metaphysical students think of turning to sheer Hobbism, of blaspheming “_nesses_ and _tudes_ and _ties_,” when he sees them dragged in and abused after this fatal fashion, which even Aristotle does not wholly escape, and in which others indulge as if it were their sole and legitimate business. It follows that, except for the stock contrast of Herodotus and Thucydides, in respect of the Orators (the exception being there due to an obvious reason), and to a less extent of the Three Tragedians, we have very few studies at once comprehensive and comparative of authors in Greek, and that, out of Longinus, such studies as we have are scrappy, technical, and altogether lacking in that critical συνάρπασμα which the great _locus_ of Simylus requires. There is really no second passage in Greek which can be put alongside of the Longinian estimate of the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, agree or disagree as we may with the details of this.