the date of this precious work. In 1854 M. Vaucher[2] inclined me to
believe that Plutarch was the author.[3] All seems to concur towards the
opinion that, if not Plutarch, at least one of his contemporaries wrote
the most original Greek essay in its kind since the _Rhetoric_ and
_Poetic_ of Aristotle.”[4]

[Footnote 2: _Etude Critique sur la traité du Sublime et les ecrits
de Longin._ Geneva.]

[Footnote 3: See also M. Naudet, _Journal des Savants_, Mars 1838,
and M. Egger, in the same Journal, May 1884.]

[Footnote 4: Egger, _Histoire de la Critique chez les Grecs_,
p. 426. Paris, 1887.]

We may, on the whole, agree that the nobility of the author’s thought,
his habit of quoting nothing more recent than the Augustan age, and his
description of his own time, which seems so pertinent to that epoch,
mark him as its child rather than as a great critic lost among the
_somnia Pythagorea_ of the Neoplatonists. On the other hand, if the
author be a man of high heart and courage, as he seems, so was that
martyr of independence, Longinus. Not without scruple, then, can we
deprive Zenobia’s tutor of the glory attached so long to his name.

Whatever its date, and whoever its author may be, the Treatise is
fragmentary. The lost parts may very probably contain the secret of its
period and authorship. The writer, at the request of his friend,
Terentianus, and dissatisfied with the essay of Caecilius, sets about
examining the nature of the Sublime in poetry and oratory. To the latter
he assigns, as is natural, much more literary importance than we do, in