there were far too many Figures, and that the subdivisions of Greek rhetoric were in many cases idle. In nothing, perhaps, is this tendency of ancient criticism better shown than in its attitude to the question of Faultlessness. [Sidenote: “_Faultlessness._”] Of course, on this question there were two parties, with many subdivisions in each. There were the extreme classics of that classic time, the wooden persons of whom Martial tells us, for whom it was enough if a thing was not “correct,” to whom a fault was a fault—indelible, incompensable, to be judged off-hand and Draconically. And at the other side there were the sensible persons, like Quintilian, like Pliny, like Martial himself (not to mention Longinus, whom some would have to be their contemporary), who contended that faults might be made up by beauties, who sneered at _mere_ “faultlessness.” But no one, not Longinus himself, seems to have taken up the position which the boldest and most consistent (it would be question-begging to say the best) modern critics take, that the whole calculus is wrong—that this notion of “faults” made up by “beauties,” of a balance-sheet, debtor and creditor, with the result struck one way or the other, is wholly a misconception. Two, I suppose, of the most representative passages in English poetry touching this subject are Lear’s apostrophe to the elements, and Milton’s episode of Sin and Death. The extreme stop-watch and foot-rule critics of the first century, like those of the eighteenth, and, perhaps, some (though they are not a prevailing party) even at the present day would call these undoubted faults, both of them sinning against the law or conception of measure in language, and the second offending still more gravely against that or those of decency, propriety, the becoming, in imagery, subject, language. The defenders, or those who might have been the defenders, of Shakespeare and Milton, from the other point of view, would admit in varying degrees that the things were faulty; but would urge the pathos of the first, the gloomy magnificence of the second, the force and power and grandeur of both, as _redeeming_ them—in a degree and to an extent again varying with the individual critic.