Indeed, as one turns over the volumes of Karsten[5] and Mullach[6] with their budgets of commentary and scholia enveloping the scanty kernel of text; as one reads the [Sidenote: _Xenophanes._] relics, so interesting, so tantalising, so pathetic, of these early thinkers who already knew of metaphysics _ce qu’on a su de tous les temps_,—one sees, scanty as they are, how very unlikely it is that, if we had more, there would be anything in it that would serve our present purpose. These Greeks, at any rate, _were_ children—children of genius, children of extraordinary promise, children almost of that gigantic breed which has to be stifled lest it grow too fast. But, like children in general, when they have any great mental development, they scorned what seemed to them little things. And, also like children, they had not and could not have the accumulation of knowledge of particulars which is necessary for the criticism of art. The audacious monopantheism of Xenophanes could not, we are sure, have stooped to consider, not as it actually did[7] whether Homer and Hesiod were blasphemers, but whether they did their blaspheming with technical cunning. In its sublimer moments and in its moments of discussion, in those of the famous single line— οὖλος ὁρᾷ, οὖλος δὲ νοεῖ, οὖλος δέ τ᾿ ἀκούει, as well as in the satire on the ox- and lion-creed of lions and oxen, it would have equally scorned the attempt to substitute for mere opinion a humble inductive approach to knowledge on the differences of Poetry and prose and the proper definition of Comedy. Even in those milder moods when the philosopher gave, if he did give, receipts for the proper mode of mixing negus,[8] and was not insensible to the charms of a soft couch, sweet wine, and devilled peas,[9] one somehow does not see him as a critic. Footnote 5: _Philosophorum Græcorum Veterum Reliquiæ. Rec. et ill. Simon Karsten_ (Amsterdam, 1830-38). Vol. i. pars 1, Xenophanes; vol. i. pars 2, Parmenides; vol. ii. Empedocles. Footnote 6: _Democriti Abderitæ Operum Fragmenta. Coll., &c., F. G. A. Mullachius_ (Berlin, 1843). Footnote 7: Karsten, i. 1. 43. Fr. 7. Footnote 8: Ibid., i. 1.77. Fr. 23. Xenophanes is emphatic on the necessity of putting the water in _first_. Footnote 9: Ibid., i. 1. 55. Fr. 17. The philosopher says merely ἐρεβίνθους, but we know from Pherecrates (_ap. Athenæum_, ii. 44) that they were parched or devilled, πεφρυγμένους.