Still less is Greek criticism represented by Aristotle. It is in the highest degree misleading to generalize from such a work as the _Poetics_. It is not merely a fragment, but a fragment deformed by desperate corruption, hopeless interstices and contemptible interpolations. If it confines itself, or in the main confines itself, to formal criticism, it is simply because it was designed to deal with that particular department of criticism, not because its author supposed that the chief question which concerned criticism was form. Again, if by form Mr. Worsfold understands, as he appears to do, expression and structure, he very much misrepresents the Treatise. Aristotle’s criterion of poetry is not its formal expression, for he distinctly declares that it is not metre which makes a poem, and even seems to maintain that a poem may be composed without metre. In Aristotle’s definition and conception of poetry as the concrete expression of the universal, in his definition of the scope and functions of tragedy, and in innumerable occasional remarks we have the germs of much, and of very much, which Mr. Worsfold would attribute to the later developments of criticism. Aristotle, it is true, derived his canons from an analysis of the masterpieces of Greek poetry, but it is doing him great injustice to say, that he would make all epics Homeric, and all plays Sophoclean, and most erroneous to assume that modern criticism commenced at this point. Aristotle distinctly questions whether tragedy had as yet perfected its proper types or not (_Poet._, IV. 11), and in discussing the proper length of tragedy he makes a remark which shows that such a plot as the plot of _Hamlet_ or the plot of _Lear_ would have been quite compatible with his canons.[38] The truth is that Mr. Worsfold has gone too far; he has confounded the various aspects of criticism with stages in its development. Aristotle dealt mainly with form, because it was his business to deal with form. Plato approached poetry from a particular point of view, because it was from that particular point of view that it concerned him.