they treated and the literary form that each had made his own, or to
analyse the metre and other more technical elements of their poetry.

But this, after all, was the natural course in the infancy of the
study. All science begins with classification; and all classification
with the external and the obvious. The Greek critics could take no
step forward until they had classified all poems as either lyric, epic,
or dramatic. And how necessary that division was may be seen from the
length at which Plato discusses the nature of the distinction in the
second book of the Republic. Even Aristotle, in this as in other things
the 'master of those who know', devotes no inconsiderable space of the
Poetics to technical matters such as the analysis of vocal sounds, and
the aptness of different metres to different forms of poetic thought.

There is another matter in which the methods of Elizabethan critics
run side by side with those of the early Greeks. In Plato and Aristotle
we are not seldom startled by the sudden transition from questions of
form to the deepest problems suggested by imaginative art. The same
is true of the Elizabethan critics. It is doubtless true that the
latter give a proportionally larger space to the more technical sides
of the subject than their Greek forerunners. They could not reasonably
be expected to write with the width of view that all the world has
admired in Aristotle and Plato. Moreover, they were from the first
confronted with a practical difficulty from which the Greek critics
were so fortunate as to be free. Was rhyme a "brutish" form of verse?
and, if so, was its place to be taken by the alliterative rhythm, so
dear to the older poets, or by an importation of classical metres,
such as was attempted by Sidney and Spenser, and enforced by the
unwearied lectures of Harvey and of Webbe? This, however technical,
was a fundamental question; and, until it was settled, there was but