The second objection is of still greater interest, because it has practically supplied a shibboleth in the Classic-Romantic debate [Sidenote: _Archaism._] up to the present moment. It is the objection to archaic, foreign, and otherwise inusitate words, which Aristotle seems to apply even to Homeric terms, not as poetic but as obsolete, just as other good persons in times nearer our own have applied the same to Chaucerisms and the like. The sounder doctrine, of course, is that _nullum tempus occurrit regi_ in this transferred sense also—that what the old kings of literature have stamped remains current for ever, and what the new kings of literature stamp takes currency at once. Almost as interesting is the third punishment-cell, in which epithets too long, too many, or out of place are bestowed. The [Sidenote: _Stock epithet and periphrasis._] two habits which seem to be mainly aimed at here (Alcidamas is still the chief awful example) are the use in prose of the poetical perpetual epithet (“white milk” is the example chosen) and the undue tendency to periphrasis, which, curiously enough, reminds one of the besetting sin of the extreme “Classical” school of the last century. Most puzzling of all are the examples pilloried for impropriety in the fourth class, the unfortunate Alcidamas being rebuked for calling philosophy “the intrenchment of law,” and [Sidenote: _False metaphor._] the Odyssey a “mirror of human life.” The most, thoroughgoing Aristotelians have given up this last criticism with an acknowledgment that ancient and modern tastes differ; while Mr Cope even suggests that Aristotle “winked,” not nodded, when he wrote the whole passage. I do not so easily figure to myself a winking Stagirite.