How much less even does one see anything of the kind in the few and great verses of Parmenides, that extraordinary link of union between Homer and Lucretius, the poet of [Sidenote: _Parmenides._] the “gates of the ways of night and day,”[10] the philosopher whose teaching is of that which “is and cannot but be?”[11] the seer whose sight was ever “straining straight at the rays of the sun”?[12] We shall see shortly how a more chastened and experienced idealism, combined in all probability with a much wider actual knowledge of literature and art, made the literary criticism of Plato a blend of exquisite rhapsody and childish crotchet. In the much earlier day of Parmenides not even this blend was to be expected. There could hardly by any possibility have been anything but the indulgence in allegorising which is equally dear to poets and philosophers, and perhaps the inception of a fanciful philology. Metaphysics and physics sufficed, with a little creative literature. For criticism there could be no room. Footnote 10: Parm. _de Natura_, l. 11; Karsten, I. ii. 29. Footnote 11: Ibid., l. 35. Footnote 12: Ibid., l. 144. But it will be said, Empedocles? Empedocles who, according to some traditions, was the inventor of Rhetoric—who certainly was a native of the island where Rhetoric arose—the [Sidenote: _Empedocles._] chief speaker among these old philosophers? That Empedocles had a good deal of the critical temper may be readily granted. He has little or nothing of the sublime beliefs of Parmenides; his scepticism is much more thorough-going than that which certainly does appear in the philosopher of Colophon. If a man do not take the discouragement of it too much to heart there is, perhaps, no safer and saner frame of mind for the critic than that expressed in the strongest of all the Empedoclean fragments, that which tells us how “Men, wrestling through a little space of life that is no life, whirled off like a vapour by quick fate, flit away, each persuaded but of that with which he has himself come in contact, darting this way and that. But the Whole man boasts to find idly; not to be seen are these things by men, nor heard, nor grasped by their minds. Thou shalt know no more than human counsel has reached.”[13] An excellent critical mood, if not pushed to mere inaction and despair: but there is no evidence that it led Empedocles to criticism. Physics and ethics appear to have absorbed him wholly. Footnote 13: Emp. _de Natura_ l. 34-40; Karsten, ii. 89, 90.