it was written. It must have imbibed from these a peculiar atmosphere, proper to the period. It must have borne a more or less definite relation to the literary taste of the age. The general principles of criticism are indeed not for an age but for all time, but when the author descends to particulars it is material to know what period he is commending or rebuking. Otherwise his treatise suffers, like a good picture shown in a wrong light. If the book is not by Longinus every reason for supposing it to be a production of the third century disappears, and, place it where we will, we shall view it in connection with a different set of circumstances from those existing when the Roman Empire was beginning to break up.

It will be desirable to preface the consideration of the external and internal evidence for the authorship of the Treatise on the Sublime' with some account of its literary history and the origin of the controversy respecting it. It was first published by Franciscus Robortellus in 1554, under the name of Dionysius Longinus, which he had found in his manuscript. Longinus was of course identified with the famous philosopher and critic of the third century, and, though some particulars of internal evidence might well have excited suspicion-as, for example, that there is no other authority for giving him the name of Dionysius,-the tract continued to be unanimously received as his until the beginning of the nineteenth. The first shock which this confidence received was from a minute piece of external testimony. In 1808 the Italian scholar Amati

observed that the title of the work in a Vatican manuscript did not read (The Treatise) of Dionysius Longinus on the Sublime, but of Dionysius or Longinus. The scribe, therefore, or the authority from which he copied, did not unhesitatingly attribute the work to Longinus, but doubted whether it might not rather be the work of some other Dionysius. There were many Dionysiuses eminent in Greek literature, but the transcriber can hardly have had any other in his mind than the most famous, Dionysius of Halicarnassus. We will inquire by-and-by whether he may not have been mistaken, but will leave the question at present between the Halicarnassean Dionysius and Longinus. After a while, the same superscription was discovered in two MSS. at Paris, and it was afterwards found that an inscription on the cover of a manuscript at Florence declared the book to be the production of an anonymous writer. The question, therefore, whether it should be attributed to Dionysius or Longinus had, so far as the evidence of manuscripts was concerned, become a fairly open one, and one manuscript even afforded ground for rejecting both. It remained to look for external or internal evidence, extraneous to the MSS., which might incline the scale.

6

The external evidence is soon stated. There is none. It is very remarkable that so admirable a work as the Treatise on the Sublime,' by common consent one of the chief ornaments of classical literature, whether we regard the author's critical acumen or the elevation of his sentiments, should not once be mentioned by any ancient author. We

know that it was copied in the tenth century, and then attributed to either Dionysius or Longinus, but all its preceding history is a blank. This is much against its being written by either of them. Both were widely read, particularly Dionysius, and it seems strange that a book like this, which the students of their writings must have put at the very head of their productions, should have been utterly forgotten when the titles of many of inferior interest have been preserved. As regards Longinus, indeed, an explanation has been attempted. His principal work was an extensive treatise entitled Philologica,' in twenty-one books. It is maintained that the tract on the Sublime' was one of these books which has got detached from the rest. But this theory is not borne out by examination, the book does not appear to be a part of a larger whole, but has much more the air of a writing complete in itself. It was by the author's own statement called into being by a special cause-his dissatisfaction with the treatise of Cæcilius, and is addressed to a particular person. This lack of external testimony certainly corroborates the view that the treatise is the production of some writer not of the very first distinction as far as general popularity was concerned, whose name has not been preserved, but whose merit has caused his work to be variously attributed to two critics of the highest rank.

The internal evidence is much more affluent. One of the strongest points is thus ably put by Professor Rhys Roberts, who has surpassed every English predecessor as a translator of Longinus:

"The Treatise on the Sublime' abounds in references to Greek authors and in quotations from them. Catholic alike in praise and blame, it ranges the centuries for its illustrations of good style or of bad. Bards of the prehistoric days of Greece, writers of its Attic prime, erudite poets of the Alexandrian era, rhetoricians of the Augustan age-all figure in its pages. But notwithstanding the great number of its references to writings of an earlier date, the Treatise (or so much of it as we now possess) makes no mention of any rhetorician, philosopher, or other writer belonging to the second or third century A.D. Here again the supporters of the traditional view that Cassius Longinus was the author are confronted by a grave difficulty. The gap is a truly remarkable one. How comes it that no reference is made to the rhetorician Hermogenes, who flourished during the reign of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, and whose shortcomings (rather than those of Cæcilius) might have provided an opening for a book? How is it that Longinus, who was the centre of a wide circle, makes no mention of his companions in the schools or of his friends? How is it, lastly and above all, that he makes no mention of his enemies, some of whom presumably had written books? For, granted that his taste may have been too fastidious to find examples of excellence in the writings of his contemporaries or of his more immediate predecessors, yet the task he set himself was the exemplification not only of the elevated manner, but also of its opposite. And to go back for examples of defective style to Alexandrian times, or to a period earlier still, instead of attacking living offenders, would have entailed the sacrifice of much obvious point and piquancy."

This is admirably put, and I have only to observe that it is by no means certain that Longinus would have found anything to censure in Hermogenes, whose extant treatises on rhetoric are highly valued, and upon whom he himself wrote a commentary,

now lost. The fact remains that the absence from the "Treatise on the Sublime' of allusion to any author later than the first century is a strong argument against its being the production of an author of the third.

There are other arguments less easy to express with precision, but even more convincing. Under any possible view, the Treatise on the Sublime' was written in Roman times. It was called forth, the author tells us, by his dissatisfaction with a treatise on the same subject by Cæcilius, and Cæcilius was an eminent rhetorician in the time of Augustus. If, then, we can find any correspondence between statements in the book and the condition of the Roman Empire at any particular period, we shall have made some progress towards determining a date, to confirm or confute the authorship of Longinus as the case may be. It cannot be expected that an essay on a literary subject should be fertile in data bearing on the contemporary condition of empires. Near the end, however, the author, whom we will continue to call Longinus, quotes or professes to quote a contemporary philosopher who has been examining into the causes of the decay of eloquence in his time. If he was a real person, and could be identified, the identification would yield the date; but it seems highly probable that he is only introduced dramatically, and that Longinus, who represents himself as answering his arguments, speaks in an assumed character that he may the better exhibit various aspects of the question. Even if so, the delineation of a state of society as actually existing tends to narrow the ground and render one period more