It is not, however, till the eighth book is reached (for the seventh, except in some remarks on arrangement, is almost [Sidenote: _Book VIII.: Style._] purely legal) that we find Quintilian, for a considerable time, at close quarters with our special subject. After summarising with remarkable clearness (so that there is nowhere any better conspectus, in little, of the matter) the earlier and technically rhetorical part of the _Institutes_, he comes to the third part, which he calls “elocution.”[386] This is no other than the _lexis_, which Aristotle treats not indeed perfunctorily (it was not in Aristotle to be guilty of that crime), but with a sort of apologetic impatience, as one turning back to the Court of the Gentiles after visiting the Holy of Holies. The point of view, with some four hundred years of great work, not merely in oratory, but in general literature, behind the critic, and with the new requirement of comparison between Greek and Latin brought in, has changed remarkably. Instead of a popular and slightly vulgar appendix, it is (Quintilian tells us that all orators agreed with him) the most difficult part of the subject. At the same time, he has not attained to the almost perfect _parrhesia_ of Longinus; he dares not tell us (though we can see that he was sometimes half minded to do so) that “beautiful words are the light of thought.” He has the stereotyped caution—very wholesome in its way—to those who neglect things and attend to words. But he will not allow words to be neglected in their turn, and as a matter of fact perhaps the greater, certainly the most interesting and original, part of the five books which follow is occupied with what, disguise itself as it may under the term of “elocution,” is really “style.” Not, be it added, the mere fritter and foppery which sometimes receives that name, but literary manner and art in the great and wide sense—the proper subject, that is to say, of literary criticism. Footnote 385: §§ 101-112. Footnote 386: Some moderns (notably Campbell in his _Philosophy of Rhetoric_) have followed Quintilian in this use of the word for “style.” But the accepted sense in English is too well settled for this to be permissible.