After Aristotle we fall back, for the ages immediately following, on the dreary and perilous chaos of fragments and titles. [Sidenote: _Theophrastus and others._] From the extant work, indeed, of his chief disciple, Theophrastus, we could guess that he dealt largely in Rhetoric. It is no rash conjecture that the famous _Characters_ themselves were intended, after a fashion of which we have but too many other examples, to provide orators and writers with cut-and-dried types on which to base their rhetorical appeals. Nay, we have titles as well as fragments of works of his bearing on the subject,—_on Style_, _on Comedy_,—but nothing whereon to base a real estimate.[58] And what is true of Theophrastus is true of hundreds of others. Only those who are fond of the pastime of letting down buckets into empty wells can derive the slightest satisfaction from knowing, or at least being informed, that Aristotle of Cyrene wrote a _Poetic_ of which we have nothing, and Phanias of Eresus a work _On Poets_ of which we have a couple of scraps.[59] It is certain that a very considerable literature, at least ostensibly critical, existed, dating from the third and later centuries. Footnote 58: As in other cases, Theophrastus has been criticised very largely on rather slim vouchers. For instance, the quotation (in Cic. Orat., 39) on the strength of which Mr. Nettleship, _Lectures and Essays_, ii. 47, speaks of him complimentarily, strikes me, I confess, as but a commonplace remark enough. It is that by Herodotus and Thucydides, “History was first stirred up to speak more freely and ornately.” Footnote 59: See for more, Egger, p. 347 _sq._ Two writers, later in time, not of much critical fertility but of some interest, will illustrate for us the attitude of two Greek [Sidenote: _Criticism of the later Philosophical Schools: The Stoics._] philosophical schools to criticism. None of these schools except the Peripatetics (and in a negative sort of way the Platonists) deserved very well of our Tenth Muse. The Stoics—when they were not in that mood of disdainful tolerance which is represented by Epictetus' doctrine of “the Inn,”[60] of less tolerance still and more disdain as shown by Marcus Aurelius,[61] or of affected contempt, almost pure and simple, as in Seneca,[62] which was their later attitude—seem in their earlier days to have devoted themselves with great vigour to grammatical investigations, and at all times to have affected the allegorical style. But we cannot wonder that they spent no pains on investigating, still less that they spent no pains on championing, that mixed intellectual and sensual pleasure which is the business and the glory of literature. Footnote 60: