The Alexandrian[59] dilation of such description[60] appears also in the long-drawn emotions of soliloquy.[61] The fixing of this as a literary type must have been promoted by the prevalence of the schools of _declamatio_,[62] where Ovid had studied. Practised in elementary form even by Roman schoolboys, developed by _declamatores_ in exhibitions of virtuosity, the fiction of what so-and-so must have said on such-and-such an occasion is still a rhetorical exercise. As an exercise it has some value in promoting poetic appreciation; but it seems hardly the way toward poetic creation. Ovid, at any rate, hardly creates persons. The address of Sol, for instance, to Phaëthon,[63] is only a more extended and more professional school theme; and the mixture of allegorical personification with myth[64] shows him rather as a rhetorician[65] than as a poet. That he is not a myth-maker, only a myth-teller, may be seen by putting any of his demigods beside the Prometheus of Æschylus—or even the Prometheus of Shelley. For re-creation Ovid lacked what the Great Unknown[66] thought to be the primary source of expression, intellectual vigor of conception. Thus his mythical persons, though always appropriate and sometimes vivid, are not alive. More has been claimed for his story-telling. Cruttwell[67] says of the _Metamorphoses_: “The skill with which different legends are woven into the fabric of the composition is as marvellous as the frivolous dilettantism which could treat a long heroic poem in such a way.” The skill of the weaving is indisputable; but is it more than an art of transition? To call the _Metamorphoses_ a long heroic poem suggests a cruel comparison with the _Æneid_, and partly begs the question. What Ovid seems to have intended, and what he achieved, is a deftly articulated collection. It is not a single poem in the sense of having emotional progress or totality, nor is any other of Ovid’s collections. His distinctively narrative art, therefore, is to be sought not in the connection between stories, but in the composition of each one. It is even probable that this art was the more popular because it offered, not a long sustained narrative, but many separable short tales.