Another and a very important matter (which it is fairer and more philosophical to call rather a defect of our understanding than a defect of the matter presented to it) lies in that impossibility of attaining the Greek standpoint as to certain rhythmical and verbal matters, which has been more than once glanced at, and which is instanced in the case of Longinus himself. Few among the wiser even of those who have paid special attention to the subjects of Greek music and Greek pronunciation would, I think, assert, that they thoroughly understand the passages relating to prose rhythm, and the special suitableness of the cretic and some of the pæons as the base-feet for it. And it is practically admitted by most sober and well-instructed critics that both Aristotle and Longinus make strictures upon things as “frigid” and in bad taste, that they ostracise metaphors and ban conceits which to any modern criticism (putting aside mere assentation) seem perfectly harmless, if not positively admirable. The same thing occurs in English and French to this day, although in this case all the difficulties which beset us in relation to Greek disappear, except the radical difference of national (not now even of temporal) ear and brain. A phrase of Bossuet, which seems to French ears even of to-day the _ne plus ultra_ of majestic melody, will strike very well-instructed Englishmen as a rhetorical jingle and French critics of enthusiasm and enlightenment will see no difference between the music of Moore and that of Shelley, or rather prefer the former. In the other sphere, what is to an Englishman a piece of dry humour will appear to a Frenchman a _saugrenu_ monstrosity; and a Frenchman’s ideal of manly eloquence, dignified or passionate as the case may be, will seem to an Englishman to show nothing but the maudlin pathos of a drunkard, or the petulant braggadocio of a child. Yet here there are innumerable side-lights, a long course of partially identical history, literature, and religion, the experience of persons of both nations who have lived in and with the other, to guide us. No wonder that, when we have none of these things, we should be puzzled. Yet the quarrel, such as it is, with the Greek critics, is not so much that their estimates, low or high, differ from ours, as that they have given us so few documents from their own side to help out the contrast. Even one essay, on both the literatures, by a Greek to set over against the invaluable survey by Quintilian would be not merely something for which we could gladly exchange most of the Greek writers on Rhetoric, except Aristotle, but something in consideration of which we would gladly read all these writers, and make no complaint of them. As it is, we have to go to Photius, a representative of a time and thought far more alien from those of the Greeks proper than is Quintilian himself, for full review of even Greek writers, and he also is silent about Latin.