“Desinat in piscem mulier formosa superne. Risum teneatis, amici. Velut ægri somnia.... Pictoribus atque poetis Quidlibet audendi semper fuit æqua potestas ... Petimusque damusque vicissim. Purpureus ... pannus ... Currente rota cur urceus exit?” And the proportion is well maintained throughout. Footnote 288: I had hoped that no reader would want explanation of this, but it has been hinted to me that some may. For them only, I note that the saying, the thought of which has found various and frequent expression, is slightly altered in form from Dryden, and is one of his happiest scholasticisms. It glances, utilising the old philosophical opposition-connection of γένεσις and φθορά, at the theory, put later by another person of genius more bluntly, that critics are those who “have failed in literature and art.” But the greatest value of the piece, beyond all doubt, is the clear and distinct idea which it gives of one, and that [Sidenote: _Typical spirit_] the principal, side of the critical conception of literature in Roman times certainly, in all times more or less. Just as, and in the same manner as, we said that Longinus plays the exception among the critics of antiquity, so does Horace represent the rule. There is indeed something in other critics of antiquity of the spirit which makes Longinus pre-eminent, but it is not prominent in them. There is in the better of them, especially in Aristotle, much that is not in Horace; but what they have in common with him is the differentia of them all. Of this latter spirit those worse points which we have noted in the piece are the caricature or corruption, the others are the rational embodiment and expression. “Observe order; do not grovel or soar too high; stick to the usage of reasonable and well-bred persons; be neither stupid nor shocking; above all, be like the best of your predecessors, stick to the norm of the class, do not attempt a perhaps impossible and certainly dangerous individuality.” In short the false _mimesis_—imitation of previous art—is mixing herself up more and more with the true _mimesis_, representation of nature. If it is not exactly true that, as a modern prose Horace has it, _Tout est dit_, at any rate the forms in which everything ought to be said have long been found out. You cannot improve on them: try to make the best use of them that you can.