often _numerus_ itself seems to be “rhythm.” Footnote 284: _Etude sur la Langue de la Rhétorique et de la Critique Littéraire dans Cicéron._ Par C. Causeret. Paris, 1886. By no means uninteresting, again, are the numerous metaphorical expressions from actual physiology—_lacerti_, _sanguis_, _nervi_, _succus_, _exsanguis_, _enervatus_—which we find applied to style, and the still more numerous but vaguer terms, most of them with modern equivalents, which express its qualities by comparison with moral ones. It is impossible not to see what an influence the use of such terms by such an author must have had, and we shall find evidences much later (in Pliny, for instance) that the language of literary criticism at Rome yielded in nothing to that beautiful dialect which enables our own censors to speak of a novel as “assertive and challenging,” of the “swiftness and fusion” of its style. But whether the influence was as beneficial as it was great is perhaps rather a different question.[285] Footnote 285: It has not seemed necessary to go through the literary passages of the _Orations_, though some, the _Pro Archia_ especially, are not infertile in them. “What _counsel_ says is not evidence,” whatever else it is. The contrast between the limited and partial relevance of Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ to literary criticism, and the complete if [Sidenote: _Horace._] still limited relevance of his _Poetics_, is repeated far more pointedly in that between the Rhetorical works of Cicero and the so-called _Ars Poetica_ of Horace. It is, in fact—though the most ardent admirers of the Venusian would fain defend it from being intentionally and originally an Art of Poetry at all—the most complete, nay, the only complete, example of literary criticism that we have from any Roman.[286] As in other similar cases, before saying much about it in the way of secondary comment, it will be well to give a fairly full analysis of it, which can be the better done because of its extreme shortness. The famous tags with which it abounds, to an extent almost unmatched, may be sometimes, but need not be always, given in full. Footnote 286: Here, however, as elsewhere, the fatally parasitic character of the whole literature comes in. There is little doubt (see Nettleship, _op. cit._) that the piece was very closely modelled upon the work of a certain Neoptolemus of Parium, an Alexandrian critic, whose date is not known. In form it is merely an _Epistola ad Pisones_, and plunges at [Sidenote: _The_ Ad Pisones.] once into its subject, without any attempt at preliminary argument or flourish.