That the sophist was the first rhetorician would be allowed by his accusers as well as by his apologists: and though Rhetoric long followed wandering fires before it recognised its true star and became Literary Criticism, yet nobody doubts that we must look to it for what literary criticism we shall find in these times. The Sophists, on the very face of the charge constantly brought against them of attending to words merely, are almost acknowledged to be the inventors of Grammar; while from the other charge that they corrupted youth by teaching them to talk fluently, to make the worse the better reason, and the like, it will equally follow that they practised the deliberate consideration of style. Grammar is only the _ancilla_ of criticism, but a tolerably indispensable one; the consideration of style is at least half of criticism itself. Accordingly the two first persons in whose work (if we had it) we might expect to find a considerable body of literary criticism, if only literary criticism of a scrappy, tentative, and outside kind, are the two great sophists Gorgias and Protagoras, contemporaries, but representatives of almost the two extremities of the little Greek world, of Leontini and Abdera, of Sicily and Thrace. We have indeed a whole catalogue of work that should have been critical or nothing ascribed by Diogenes Laertius[14] to the still greater contemporary and compatriot of Protagoras, Democritus. How happily would the days of Thalaba (supposing Thalaba to be a historian of criticism) go by, if he had that little library of works which Diogenes thus assigns and calls "Of _Music_"! They are eight in number: “On Rhythm and Harmony,” “On Poetry” (one would compound for this alone), “On the Beauty of Words,”[15] “On Well- and Ill-sounding Letters,” “On Homer or Right Style and Glosses,”[16] “On the Aoedic Art,” “On Verbs(?),”[17] and an _Onomasticon_. But Democritus lived in the fifth [Sidenote: _Democritus._] century before Christ, and Diogenes in the second century after Christ; the historian’s attribution is unsupported, and he has no great character for accuracy; while, worst of all, he himself tells us that there were six Democriti, and that of the other five one was a musician, another an epigrammatist, and a third (most suspiciously) a technical writer on rhetoric. It stands fatally to reason that as all these (save the Chian musician) seem to have been more modern, and as the works mentioned would exactly fall in with the business of the musician and the teacher of rhetoric, they are far more likely, if they ever existed (and Diogenes seems to cite rather the catalogue of a certain Thrasylus than the books themselves), _not_ to have been the work of the Laughing Philosopher. At any rate, even if they were, we are utterly ignorant of their tenor. Footnote 14: Diog. Laert., ix. 7, p. 239 ed. Cobet (Didot Collection). Footnote 15: