The disappearance of texts, always lamentable, if not actually irremediable, is here more to be regretted than anywhere, because there is fair reason for believing that, at any rate, some of these grammarians were critics in the full and proper sense of the term. By far the greater part of their labours appears to have been directed to Homer, and there is no reason to contradict the general, the received, opinion that while the Pisistratean redaction is not quite certain in fact, and almost entirely unknown in nature, while it is certain that even Aristotle had before him a text differing remarkably from our own, the Alexandrian grammarians practically produced that which we have. It is accordingly from this time that the famous and formidable craft—science it would no doubt call itself—of textual criticism may be said to date; and from our information, second-hand as it is, we are enabled to recognise some types of textual critics which are not, and are never likely to be, obsolete. In Aristophanes, the spelling reformer, the practical originator of accents, it is not rash to see the great exemplar of the critic [Sidenote: _Their Four Masters._] of the purely philological kind, who busies himself with those literary matters which are most remote from literature proper, though no doubt he is a very valuable person when he is kept in his proper place. Zenodotus stands in the same relation to the lexicographical critic, and seems also to have been the father of all those who by “a critical text” mean a text arranged at their own discretion, passages being expunged, transposed, or corrected, not in accordance with any testimony as to what the author did write, but according to the critic’s idea of what he ought to have written—in other words, what the critic himself would have liked him to write, or would, if he could, have written in his place. Aristarchus appears to have deserved the primacy generally accorded to him by being more wisely conservative than Zenodotus, and less tempted to stick in the letter than the lesser Aristophanes; as well as by a general display, in his more literary remarks, of critical faculty greater than was possessed by either, and infinitely greater than that of the average scholiast. While the still earlier, and at least equally famous or notorious, name of Zoilus is of itself sufficient to show that the critic who is merely or mainly a snarler can at least boast that he is of an ancient house.