The other passage[308] begins with equal abruptness, and serves as preface only to a very much longer poetical recitation by Eumolpus, who speaks it. It is chiefly noteworthy for containing the phrase _Curiosa felicitas_, applied to Horace, which perhaps itself gives us as good a notion of Petronius’ critical faculty as anything could. But it conveys some sound doctrine. Verse itself seems easy; any boy thinks he can write it as soon as he has learnt the rules, and retired orators (a hit, I suppose, at Cicero) compose it as a relaxation, as if it were easier than their speeches. But it is no such light matter. You must take choice words [we are almost at Dante’s “sifted” words], words far from the use of the vulgar crowd,[309] and at the same time you must be careful that individual phrases are not too fine for the rest. Nor must you treat your subject—civil war, for instance—in the mere tone of a chronicler, but the “free spirit must be forced through[310] difficulties, and the ministry of the gods, and a fabulous torment of sentences, so that it may rather appear the vaticination of a frenzied mind than a trustworthy and scrupulous document under attestation.” Now this advice, though much in it is sound, takes distinctly the other side to that which Encolpius had urged in the overture. Footnote 308: § 118. Ed. cit., p. 71. Footnote 309: _Refugiendum est ab omni verborum ut ita dicam vilitate, et sumendæ voces a plebe summotæ._ Footnote 310: _Præcipitandus est liber spiritus._ A characteristic Petronian phrase which will serve (and has in part been used) as text for very different sermons. Part of what follows is no doubt intentionally obscure. The _ambages deorumque ministeria_ refer, of course, to the stock revolutions and interventions of Epic as of Tragedy. But _fabulosum sententiarum tormentum_ is not such plain sailing. I _think_ it means (with an intentional side-glance at the fabled torments which the heroes of Epic see in Hades) the process of racking the brain for story-ornament and sententious conceit of phrase. On the whole, we must regret very keenly that we have not more of the Arbiter’s remarks on the subject. It is improbable that anything like a coherent theory of criticism on the great scale would have emerged, and very likely that (as in the two extant examples just quoted) we should rather have had ingenious centos of opposing views. But all would have been originally and brightly put, and it is by no means impossible that what we now chiefly desiderate—_aperçus_ of particular authors, books, or passages, done with grasp and insight—would have been forthcoming. As it is, we have but what we have.