rule, he ends with a touch of compunction: 'We will give her
champions, not poets themselves but poet-lovers, an opportunity to
make her defence in plain prose and show that she is not only
sweet--as we well know--but also helpful to society and the life of
man, and we will listen in a kindly spirit. For we shall be gainers, I
take it, if this can be proved.' Aristotle certainly knew the passage,
and it looks as if his treatise on poetry was an answer to Plato's
challenge.

Few of the great works of ancient Greek literature are easy reading.
They nearly all need study and comment, and at times help from a good
teacher, before they yield up their secret. And the _Poetics_ cannot
be accounted an exception. For one thing the treatise is fragmentary.
It originally consisted of two books, one dealing with Tragedy and
Epic, the other with Comedy and other subjects. We possess only the
first. For another, even the book we have seems to be unrevised and
unfinished. The style, though luminous, vivid, and in its broader
division systematic, is not that of a book intended for publication.
Like most of Aristotle's extant writing, it suggests the MS. of an
experienced lecturer, full of jottings and adscripts, with occasional
phrases written carefully out, but never revised as a whole for the
general reader. Even to accomplished scholars the meaning is often
obscure, as may be seen by a comparison of the three editions recently
published in England, all the work of savants of the first eminence,
[1] or, still more strikingly, by a study of the long series of
misunderstandings and overstatements and corrections which form the
history of the _Poetics_ since the Renaissance.

[1] Prof. Butcher, 1895 and 1898; Prof. Bywater, 1909; and Prof.
Margoliouth, 1911.