Still more indisputable is the singular spirit of routine—of red-tape—which pervades the piece. Aristotle (whom Horace follows without direct acknowledgment, and by no means slavishly, but still on the whole) had been sufficiently positive, and not seldom a little arbitrary; but he had carefully abstained [Sidenote: _and arbitrary conventionality._] from mere red-tape. Horace, in his prescription of the five acts, and his proscription of the fourth actor, measures that tape off in a fashion which implies one of two things, both of them bad—either implicit belief in purely arbitrary rules, or indifference to the mischief that such rules may do. Elsewhere, though his good sense sometimes interferes to advantage, he is, though less meticulously, as slavishly conventional. You must use the consecrated metres, and no others, for the various subjects; you must keep to the accepted lineaments of well-known characters, and you must model your new ones strictly on types. Decency, propriety, convention—to these things you must look throughout. If you are really a great poet you may be allowed a “fault” or two, as a great beauty is allowed a mole, but still it is a “fault.” And so this kind of pottering and peddling censorship goes on through the whole. We are at such an antithesis or antipodes to the Περὶ Ὕψους, that one sometimes feels inclined to give the _Ars Poetica_ a third title and call it Περὶ μεσότητος, or _De Mediocritate_, so directly does it tend to produce the quality which, in one of its own happier moments, it denounces. All this, I say, is undeniable, or, if it be denied, the denial is of no consequence. But the compensatory merits are very considerable. [Sidenote: _Its compensations: Brilliancy._] In the first place, it is no small thing to have got once more to purely, or almost purely, literary criticism, to have done with the sense that literature as such is only the second thought, the _parergon_, at best the mere means, not the end, to the critic. In the second place, it is a greater thing still to have our literary criticism, now that we have got it, done by such a man as Horace, one in whom the generation of the critic has not waited for the corruption of the poet,[288] and who has the peculiar gift of crisp rememberable felicitous phrase. The few hundred lines of the little piece are positively “made of quotations.” Every man of letters, at least, ought to have learnt it by heart in the original during his youth. Yet even to those who have not been thus favoured, but who have some tincture of Humanity, mere scraps and tags of it must often recall the actual context, or at least the sense. The first five-and-twenty lines contain, in the way of such “lights” of phrase, at least seven:—