Poetica_ of Horace that the twin treatises of the Stagirite play to each other. Footnote 281: It is one of Ovid’s titles (_v. infra_) to credit as a critic that he did see the value of Lucretius, and expressed it in the well-known couplet (_Amor._, i. 15. 25)— “_Carmina sublimis tunc sunt peritura Lucreti, Exitio terras quum dabit una dies._” Virgil’s still better known quit-rent for his borrowings (_Georg._, ii. 490) is a mere praise of the Lucretian _free-thought_, with no reference to poetry. But the praise (no mean one) of having appreciated Lucretius better than any other Roman is due to Statius (_v. infra_, pp. 268-270). There is, however, no small difference between the values of the Rhetorical works themselves. The _Ad Herennium_, even if [Sidenote: _His Rhetorical works._] it were as certainly Cicero’s as it is almost certainly not his, would require very small attention, for it is a strict _Techne_ or Art of Rhetoric, of the kind which we have thoroughly examined in the First Book, rigidly limited to Oratory, and containing nothing that may not be found in a dozen or a hundred other places. The _De Inventione_—more probably, if still not certainly, Cicero’s—is equally technical, and has hardly anything of interest for us except a quotation from Curio, which gives the lie direct to the “saw” of our “dead shepherd,”[282] _Nemo potest uno aspectu neque præteriens in amorem incidere_. It is to Cicero’s credit that he cites this as a rhetorical assumption, as saying that what happens rarely does not happen at all. The _De Oratore_ looks more promising, especially as there are references, in its very _exordia_, to the study of letters and its difficulty. There is a passage of some interest in Book II., cap. 12, 13, on the connection of oratory and history, with a short review of the Greek historians; and another of somewhat wider reference in cap. 7 of Book III., besides, it may be, others still here and there, especially that which begins about the 37th chapter of the third book. The _Brutus_ is the best of all, with its survey of the Latin orators and its account of the author’s literary education. The _Orator_ deals still more closely with oratorical style, as does the little tract, _De Optimo Genere Oratorum_. The _Partitiones_ and the _Topica_ are again mainly, if not even merely, technical. Footnote 282: _As You Like It_, iii. 5. 82.