As Rhetoric preserved her authority not merely to the latest classical times but right through the Middle Ages, and even at [Sidenote: _Its documents._] the close of the latter escaped, at the cost only of some minor changes and additions, the decay which fell upon the rest of Scholastic learning, it is not surprising that the _Rhetores Græci_ received early attention from the young art of Printing. Had not Aldus, in 1508-1509, collected them in two folio volumes, it is perhaps rather unlikely that we should have had any more modern collections at all. For technical Rhetoric fell into even more disfavour than Logic with the rise of physical science and materialist philosophy in the seventeenth century; and though, in some applied senses of the word, it has never fallen into complete disuse, it has never, as Logic has, recovered position in its stricter and more formal forms. It was therefore no small feat, even of German industry, when, some seventy years ago, Christian Walz of Tübingen undertook a new edition,[125] which, though some additions and improvements have since been made by Spengel[126] and others, remains the main standard and thesaurus. Its ten stout volumes, of some seven thousand closely printed pages, have probably been read through, and line by line, by hardly a single person for each decade of the seven during which it has been before the world. For not only is the bulk enormous, but the matter is extremely technical; there is endless repetition, commentaries on commentaries on commentaries forming no small part of the whole, while the minute definition and special terminology[127] require extremely careful reading. I shall not pretend to have read every word of it myself; but I have read a very great deal of it, and everything that follows can be guaranteed as drawn at first hand. Footnote 125: 9 vols. (really 10, vol. vii. being in two large parts), Stuttgart, Tübingen, London and Paris, 1832-36. Footnote 126: Spengel’s handy collection (3 vols., 4 parts), which has now been for some years in process of re-editing in the _Bibliotheca Teubneriana_ by Römer and Hammer, omits the scholia on Hermogenes, but includes divers all-important, if elsewhere accessible, texts, such as Aristotle and Longinus, and adds some minor things. Footnote 127: It is not, I hope, illiberal to remark that our excellent “Liddell & Scott” is perhaps more to seek in rhetorical terminology than anywhere else. (At least it certainly was so up to the 7th or penultimate edition: I have not yet worked with that of 1896.) Ernesti’s _Lexicon Technologiæ Græcorum Rhetoricæ_ (Leipsic, 1795) is, for all its 105 years, still almost indispensable to the student, more so even than the corresponding and somewhat younger Latin volume (Leipsic, 1797). Even these fail sometimes.