It may be pleaded, of course, that our comic fragments are very mainly preserved to us by grammarians, scholiasts, and lexicographers, who were more likely to find the unusual locutions for which they principally looked in those descriptions of the fishmarket and the stews, of which we have so many, than in literary disquisitions. But in these myriads of fragments, motelike as they often are, it is contrary to probability that we should not find at least a respectable proportion of allusions to any subject which was frequently treated by the comic writers, just as we do find references not merely to fish and the hetæræ, but to philosophy (such references are common enough), to cookery, politics, dress, and all manner of things except literary criticism. Parodies of serious pieces there may have been; but parody, though akin to criticism, is earlier,[28] and is rather criticism in the rough. And it is probable, or rather certain, that the example of the greatest of Comic poets was followed by the smaller fry in attacks on Euripides; but these attacks need not have been purely literary at all. The contrast between comedy and tragedy attributed to Antiphanes[29] in his _Poiesis_ bears solely on the subject, and the necessity of greater inventiveness on the part of the comic poet. Footnote 28: Thus we find it constantly in the Middle Ages, where pure criticism is still almost unknown. Once only, so far as I have been able to discover, do we come upon a passage which (if it be genuine, of which there [Sidenote: _Simylus_ (?).] seems to be doubt for more than one reason) has undoubted right to rank. This is the extremely, the almost suspiciously, remarkable passage attributed to the Middle Comic poet, Simylus, by Stobæus, who, be it remembered, can hardly have lived less than eight or nine hundred years later. This advances not only a theory of poetry and poetical criticism, but one of such astonishing completeness that it goes far beyond anything that we find in Aristotle, and is worthy of Longinus himself at his very happiest moment, while it is more complete than anything actually extant in the Περὶ Ὕψους. It runs as follows:[30] “Neither is nature without art sufficient to any one for any practical achievement, nor is art which has not nature with it. When both come together there are still needed a _choragia_,[31] love of the task, practice, a lucky occasion, time, a _critic able to grasp what is said_. If any of these chance to be missing, a man will not come to the goal set before him. Natural gifts, good will, painstaking method—this is what makes wise and good poets. Number of years makes neither, but only makes them old.” Footnote 29: See Egger (p. 73), who as usual makes a little too much of it. The original may be found in Athenæus (at the opening of Bk. vi. 222 _a_: vol. i. p. 485, ed. Dindorf), where it is followed by a burlesque encomium on tragedy from the comic poet Timocles, or in Meineke, ed. cit., p. 397.