A good deal of evil—too much some may think—has here been spoken of the Figures: it will, at any rate, dispense us from saying any more in this place, though the occasion for doing so may recur. But the good of them as an exercise—as, in the language of their own curious technique, a _progymnasma_—cannot be exaggerated. Short of the merest rote-work, the consideration of them, the realisation of what they meant, the investigations necessary to refer to one or the other head the phrases of the great writers, were all of them critical processes, the defect rather than the excess of which is to be reproached upon most modern criticism. Exclaim as we may against the practice of ticketing a peculiarity of style as if it were an atom, scientifically isolated, foreordained from the creation of things, and merely gathered and applied by the writer—yet it required at least some exercise of the pure critical spirit to separate this atom, consider it, class it. Figure-hunting and figure-shaping may have been aberrations of the critical spirit, but they showed that spirit: they may have led too many to acquiesce in mere terminology, but they showed the way to something very different from any such acquiescence. If, finally, we turn to the results of Greek criticism as applied to Greek authors, we come to a region necessarily of doubt, if not exactly of dread. The preoccupations of the writers in various directions, which have already been mentioned, and the occasional difficulty of placing ourselves at their point of view, make the necessary adjustments difficult, but they do not make them hopeless.