Yet it will readily be perceived that none of these allowances is damning to the individual, while most of them even increase his value as a representative of the period itself. That he was, and was regarded by the time itself as, one of the most eminent of contemporary men of letters, cannot reasonably be doubted, though he certainly yokes himself rather unequally with Tacitus. And he is none the worse witness that, though a generous admirer of antiquity, he avowedly was by no means so out of conceit with his own time as men of letters often are. That this age was no decrepit one need hardly be said—with Persius “dead ere his prime,” and Martial, Juvenal, Quintilian, Tacitus, Statius, and Pliny himself, in full flourishing, with Marcus Aurelius and Arrian coming, with Lucian and Apuleius not far off—to mention no others—it had something considerable to show and say for itself. If we can obtain anything like a clear view of its opinions on literary criticism (to which it was naturally inclined, as being itself not of the very first, and having pasts of the very first behind it), we shall not do ill. And Pliny gives us help of a very special kind, and in very abundant degree, for the attainment of such a view, which we may proceed to take, after noticing briefly the only other documents of the time which require notice for our purpose. These are the Apocrypha[370] of Quintilian, which are, for more reasons than one, best regarded apart from the _Institutes_. There are, in the first place, the _Declamations_, already referred to[371]—nineteen complete, with sketches, fragments, and skeletons of a much larger number, which even thus falls short of the huge total of nearly four hundred assigned to him after a fashion. If the whole were written on the scale of the score that we possess, they would fill some four thousand closely printed pages. Interesting, in a fashion, they are; as pointed out above, they supply, with the works of the elder Seneca, our only considerable bodies in Latin of that work of the schools which for centuries occupied the growing intellects of the two great ancient literary nations, and which supplied the never-blunted point of the satirist’s “Ut pueris placeas et declamatio fias.” Footnote 370: The _Declamations_ were last edited, I think, by Ritter in the Teubner Library. That invaluable collection puts (as indeed is usual) the _Dialogus_ with the other minor works of Tacitus, ed. Halm. It may also be found, with the same company, in the new Oxford _Bibliotheca Classicorum_, ed. Furneaux. I use a pretty and convenient joint edition of the nineteen complete Declamations and the Dialogue, which appeared at Oxford, without editor’s name, in 1692. Footnote 371: _V. supra_, p. 230 _sq._