Classical Criticism, as we have seen in the preceding volume, had invariably in theory, and almost as invariably in practice, confined itself wholly or mainly to the consideration of “the subject.” [Sidenote: _but classical_]Although Aristotle himself had not denied the special pleasure of art and the various kinds of art, although Plato, in distrusting and denouncing, had admitted the psychagogic faculties thereof; yet nobody except Longinus had boldly identified the chief end of it with “transport,” not with persuasion, with edification, or anything of the kind. Accordingly, those who looked to the ancients to help them against the _Obscuri Viri_ on the one hand, and against good Puritan folk like our own Ascham on the other, were almost bound to keep the _pleasure_ of poetry and literature generally in the background; or, if they brought it to the front at all, to extol it and defend it on ethical and philosophical, not on æsthetic grounds. Taking a hint from their “sweet enemy” Plato, from Plutarch, and from such neo-Platonic utterances as that tractate of Plotinus, which has been discussed in its place,[9] they set themselves to prove that poetry was _not_ a sweet pleasant deceit or corrupting influence in the republic, but a stronghold and rampart of religious and philosophical truth. [Sidenote: _and anti-Puritan._]Calling in turn Aristotle to their assistance, and working him in with his master and rival, they dwelt with redoubled and at length altogether misleading and misled energy on “Action,” “Unity,” and the like. And when they did consider form it was, always or too often, from the belittling point of view of the ancients themselves in spirit, and from the meticulous point of view of Horace (who had always been known) in detail. Here and there in such a man as Erasmus (v. _infra_), who was nothing if not sensible, we find the Gellian and Macrobian particularisms taken up with a really progressive twist towards inquiry as to the bearing of these particularities on the pleasure of the reader. But Erasmus was writing in the “false dawn”; the Puritan tyranny of Protestantism on the one side, and of the Catholic revival on the other, had not brought back a partial night as yet; and some of the best as well as some of the worst characteristics of the new age inclined those of his immediate successors rather than contemporaries, who adopted criticism directly, to quite different ways. ----- Footnote 9: Vol. i. pp. 67, 68. -----