The fact is, that on what we may call the other side of his virtue—to call it the defect of his quality would be rather to beg the question—he is, after all, a preceptist with some difference. Not merely is he an unflinching and almost “right-or-wrong” Aristotelian, but from genuine agreement of taste and judgment he still criticises almost wholly by Kinds. It is _the_ drama, _the_ epic, _the_ fable, _the_ lyric, _the_ epigram that he makes for, across or sometimes almost outside of the actual examples of their classes. And here, too, we find that the more poetical divisions and the more poetical aspects of these and others have no very special appeal to him. He belittles Lyric altogether; if he is particularly fond of the Fable in the special sense, it is because it also has a “fable” in the general, it is an imitation of life, a criticism of it. His attempt to prove that Horace had no looking-glasses in his bedroom[63] is a pleasant pendant to his indignation with Roxalana’s _minois chiffonné_: and though there is a great deal to be said for Martial, Lessing[64] is bribed to adopt the _vita proba_ view rather by the Roman poet’s intense _vivacity_ than by his literary merit. [Sidenote: _His study of antiquity more than compensating._] Yet this, once more, is but “the other side of a virtue.” The best authorities agree that to Lessing may be assigned absolutely the return to, if not the very initiation of,[65] a direct, scholarly, intelligent, _literary_ study of the ancients themselves. As far as the Greek Theatre itself is concerned, Brumoy had anticipated him: far too little justice has often been done to the work of this modest and solid scholar. But Brumoy’s outlook was wanting in range. Lessing had in his mind, as well as Latin and Greek, English,[66] French and German always, Italian, even Spanish[67] to some extent. And he read the Latin and the Greek in themselves—and with all due apparatus of technical scholarship considering his time. He was as far from the twice- and thrice-garbled sciolism of the average French, and even English, critic of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth century, as from the arid pedantry of the Dutch and German scholars of the same date. To him, more perhaps than to any one else, it is due that modern criticism has not followed, more than it has done, the mere foolishness of the “modern” advocates in the Quarrel—that it has fortified itself with those sound and solid studies which antiquity alone can supply. For once more let it be said that if, from the pure critical point of view, Ancient without Modern is a stumbling-block, Modern without Ancient is foolishness utter and irremediable. [Sidenote: _And especially of Aristotle._]