If we but possessed that ode or pæan of Tynnichus[24] of Chalcis, which, it would appear from the _Ion_,[25] Plato not merely thought the only good thing among its author’s works, but regarded as a masterpiece in itself! If we could but ourselves compare the works of Antimachus with those of the more popular Chœrilus, to which Plato himself is said to have so much preferred them that he sent to Colophon to have a copy made for his own use! Then we might know what his real literary preferences in the way of poetry were, instead of being put off with beautiful, invaluable, but hopelessly vague enthusiasms about poetic beauty in the abstract, and with elaborate polemics against Homer and Hesiod from a point of view which is not the point of view of literary criticism at all. But these things have been grudged us. There are assertions, which we would not only fain believe, but have no difficulty whatever in believing, that the aversion to poets represented in the _Republic_ and the _Laws_ was, if not feigned, hypothetical and, as one may say, professional. But this, though a comfort generally, is of no assistance to us in our present inquiry. The old comparison of the lantern “high, far-shining, _empty_” recurs depressingly.[26] Footnote 24: Not only have we not this: we have practically nothing of Tynnichus. His page in Bergk (iii. 379) is blank, except for the phrase which Plato himself quotes: εὕρημά τι Μοισᾶν—“a windfall of the Muses.” Of a very commonplace distich about Agamemnon’s ship, quoted by Procopius, we may apparently relieve him. Footnote 25: 534 D. Footnote 26: If the space and treatment here allotted to Plato seem exceeding poor and beggarly, it can but be urged that his own criticism of literature is so exceedingly _general_ that in this book no other treatment of it was possible. On his own principles we should be “praising the horse in terms of the ass” if we did otherwise. It is true that besides the _attitude_ above extolled, there are to be found, from the glancing, many-sided, parabolic discourse of the _Phædrus_ to the mighty theory of the _Republic_, endless things invaluable, nay, indispensable, to the critic. It is nearly certain that, as Professor Butcher thinks, no one had anticipated him in the recognition of the organic unity necessary to a work of literary, as of all, art. But even here, as in the messages “to Lysias and all others who write orations, to Homer and all others who write poems, to Solon, &c.,” we see the generality, the abstraction, the evasiveness, one may almost say, of his critical gospel. Such concrete things as the reference to Isocrates at the end of the _Phædrus_ are very rare; and, on the other hand, his frequent and full dealings with Homer are not literary criticism at all. In a treatise on Æsthetics Plato cannot have too large a space; in a History of Criticism the place allotted to him must be conspicuous, but the space small.