In the _Aletheophilus_, which followed (1741), Baumgarten expanded and, at the same time, condescended a little. A poem is now a “lively” oration instead of “sensitive” words, and so lively that it demands metrical expression. Herein he seems to his severer critics to have derogated. “Liveliness,” they say, was in _sensitiva_, only better: “metre” was in _perfecta_ by implication. One can only say that _we_ prefer to take it explicitly. And Baumgarten, like all other theorists with hardly an exception, grudges the admission of metre after all. He calculates that it gives only a very small proportion of the charm of poetry. True, the admission of it at all—with the further prescription of “thoughts that burn,” “brilliant order,” “regular,” that is to say, pure, neatly adjusted, adequate, and charming “expression,” does something to dress up the bare skeleton of the _perfecta sensitiva oratio_. But it does more to show what a bodiless skeleton it is. [Sidenote: _The_ Æsthetica.] The _Æsthetica_ itself,[262] which had been preceded by a sort of pilot-engine in the shape of a redaction of Baumgarten’s professorial lectures by his pupil, G. F. Meier,[263] expands, after a rather Vossian pattern, the principles of the two earlier books, dwelling much on “perfection,” on the innate disposition of the soul towards beautiful thoughts, and the like. He is perhaps most justly thanked for his insistence on _sensitiva_—on the sensual as well as intellectual appeal of poetry. But his illustration from actual ancient poetry is not rich: and that from modern almost non-existent.[264] To Baumgarten we have given some place as to a pioneer even in a branch of criticism which we do not intend to pursue. His followers, Sulzer and Eberhard, must have less room, and Moses Mendelssohn, between them, is elsewhere treated. [Sidenote: _Sulzer._] The well-known _Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste_[265] of Sulzer, to which the often quoted _Zusätze_ of Blankenberg belong as supplement, is in reality a painful compound of Dictionary and Bibliography, wherein you go from _Copiren_ to _Corinthische Ordnung_, and from _Menuet_ to _Metalepsis_. Such things, invaluable for their time, are almost necessarily thrown into the wallet at his back by Time himself. But they serve as a text for a repetition of the sober truth that the immense reputation and the really solid achievement of Germany since have been not a little due to the provision of them by her eighteenth-century writers. Mere knowledge will not do everything: and it is peculiarly liable to degenerate into a simple rag-bag and marine-store accumulation of things that are _not_ knowledge. But the average man can do very little without it; he can sometimes do quite surprising things with it. And while the less than average man is without it mainly negligible, it would be wofully easy to provide examples in which persons, certainly or possibly much above the average in ability, have made shipwreck by neglecting it.