So, even more evidently and pervasively, is the broader distinction between oratory and poetry. Rhetoric and poetic connoted two fields of composition, two habits of conceiving and ordering, two typical movements. The movement of the one the ancients saw as primarily intellectual, a progress from idea to idea determined logically; that of the other, as primarily imaginative, a progress from image to image determined emotionally. This distinction is more fundamental than that of so-called literary forms. The ancients were well aware that a particular composition might shift from one movement to the other, a play of Euripides lean toward oratory, an oration of Isocrates move for a while in the mode of poetry. What they contemplated in their division was not primarily a composition, but composition as a general habit, the predominant and determining way of composing, the difference between the habitual movement of a Demosthenes and that of a Sophocles. Finding these to be distinct essentially, as typical processes of conceiving, ordering, and uttering, Aristotle treated them separately as two distinct technics, rhetoric and poetic.[7] That the distinction between the habitual composition, or movement, of rhetoric and that of poetic is not oftener made explicitly by ancient critics need cause little surprise. The distinction may have been familiar enough to be tacitly assumed. It is, in fact, often assumed; it was quite clear in the mind of whoever wrote the _De sublimitate_; but it is sharply defined and fully carried out only by Aristotle. We must remember that ancient criticism had no second Aristotle, that it was preoccupied with rhetoric, and that it usually discussed speaking and writing, as modern criticism does no less usually, in terms of style. The long history of criticism shows few outstanding works on composition in the large. None the less for the meagerness of criticism, the active presence of the distinction is seen in the greatest works of antiquity. Nor is the distinction unknown to modern criticism. It is misinterpreted, for instance, at the beginning of Blair’s Lecture XXXVIII, confirmed by De Quincey’s distinction[8] between literature of knowledge and literature of power, and revived in the division, cited by Renard[9] from H. Balzac, into “_écrivains d’idées_ and _écrivains d’images_.” But in spite of significant occurrences and recurrences, it seems not to have controlled any consecutive movement of modern criticism.