It will be seen from this that the _Rhetoric_, like the _Poetics_, is invaluable to the historian of literary criticism, but that, in [Sidenote: _General effect of the_ Rhetoric.] this case as in that, literary criticism was only partly the object in the writer’s eye, while even so far as he had it before him, his views were very largely limited, and were even in some cases distorted, coloured, and positively spoilt by certain accidents of place, time, and circumstance. As our poetical criticism was injuriously affected by the non-existence of the novelist, so our prose criticism is injuriously affected by the omnipresence of the orator. As our Poetics were adulterated with ethic and other things, so our Rhetoric is warped by poetical, jurisprudential, and other preoccupations. In the first, poetry itself is not indeed itself a secondary consideration, but divers secondary considerations ride it, like a company of old men of the sea. In the second, prose as prose is merely and avowedly a secondary consideration: it is always in the main, and sometimes wholly, a mere necessary instrument of divers practical purposes. To supplement these two general treatises, we could wish for more particular applications, but we have not got them. We have indeed some vestiges of work of the kind which are not altogether encouraging. M. Egger[50] has endeavoured to extract some references to literary criticism from the general _Problems_; but these deal at best with the remotest fringes of the topic—why melancholy is so often apparent in persons of genius, and the like,—questions indeed of the very first interest, but not of the kind which we are here pursuing. In the extant fragments, however, which belong or may have belonged to the lost _Homeric Problems_[51] (or _aporems_ or _zetems_) [Sidenote: _The_ Homeric Problems.] we have metal more attractive. It may be said that the scholiasts, through whom we have most of these excerpts, were likely to select them according to the principles which, as we shall see,[52] governed themselves; but they do not all come through scholiasts, and yet the complexion of all is more or less uniform. It is that “ethical-dramatic” complexion, as we may call it, which we have noticed and shall notice as being the Greek critical “colour”—sometimes to the utter exclusion, and almost always to the effacement, of actual criticism. “Why did Agamemnon try experiments on the Greeks? Why did Odysseus take his coat off? Why is Menelaus represented as having no female companion? Why [a curial instance of that commentatorial _lues_ which infects the greatest commentators as the least, the most ancient as the most modern] is Lampetie represented as carrying to the Sun the news of the slaughter of his oxen, when the Sun sees everything? Why did the poet make Paris a wretch who was not only beaten in duel, who not only ran away, but who was specially excited by love immediately afterwards?” Footnote 50: _Op. cit._, p. 194 _sq._