The Aristotelian distinction of poetic from rhetoric has been sometimes blurred, sometimes ignored, by criticism. Such confusion as thus arises became more common in ancient criticism with the waning of ancient art; it was widespread in the middle age; it has reappeared many times since the Renaissance.[1] For consistent development of poetic as a technic distinct from rhetoric is beyond the occasion of most criticism, whether ancient or modern. At an ebb tide of creation especially, the average critic is likely to confine his observations to style; and there the two technics have much common ground. Even in criticism of composition we have seen often in our own time such familiar terms as unity, emphasis, and coherence restricted to their rhetorical definitions, and yet imposed in these senses on composition whose actual control was quite different. The unity of the _Ancient Mariner_, for instance, has been interpreted as the logical control of the proposition “He prayeth best who loveth best,” though surely that composition was unified quite otherwise. Or the term coherence is permitted to suggest that the progress of Burke’s speech on _Conciliation_ from paragraph to paragraph is like the progress of _Othello_ from scene to scene, though the two technics have little resemblance. Such warping of poetic has sometimes been even urged by ancient or modern schoolmasters and text-books. It has seemed thrifty to make Molière, for instance, exhibit those principles of composition which pupils must use in writing essays upon him. But even without such pedagogical perversion it is easy to think of poetic in terms of rhetoric; for rhetoric is in everybody’s head. It was so much more a preoccupation of ancient thought that the conception of poetic as a distinct movement seems to have become less and less active. Though a few critics, even under the Empire, held the Aristotelian distinction, generally ancient poetic was more and more warped toward rhetoric. With rhetoric determining education, with even Cicero and Tacitus discussing poetic as contributory, with the later _declamatores_ habitually blending the two, with even poets yielding to the common tendency, poetic could hardly be conceived often as a distinct movement of composition. While Vergil’s art revealed a critical conception unknown to Seneca and Lucan, Horace could repeat Aristotle without following his distinctive idea. Cicero and Tacitus, best of Latin critics, naturally contemplate in poetic rather its imagery than its movement;[2] and Quintilian,[3] even more naturally, explores only its treasures available for orators. That ancient criticism never lost the Aristotelian distinction altogether appears in the anonymous and undated _De sublimitate_[4] and in a few of the many words of Dio Chrysostom;[5] but Plutarch’s poetic is indistinguishable from rhetoric. B. CRITICISM FROM GRAMMARIANS