writers of every period. And certain obvious merits and characteristics of his poetry were pointed out by every professor of literature in the schools of Greece or Rome, and furnished a supply of materials for a panegyric, which any writer who chose could work up and expand at pleasure. But we find nothing to make us believe that Pindar was widely read among men of average culture among the ancients. When a poet is really popular in any age, the general literature of the age is certain to supply proofs of his popularity. Quotations, intended or unintended, from his works abound in the pages not only of rhetoricians and poets, but of philosophers and sober historians. The general interest in him is shown by unprofessional criticisms on particular details—often original and sometimes permanently valuable—which meet us from time to time in the most unexpected quarters. Nothing of this kind happens in the case of Pindar. Minute students like Dionysius of Halicarnassus[1] compile elaborate lists of the merits which a close and painful analysis has revealed to them in his writings. Rhetorical men of letters like Quintilian[2] favour the general public with a select edition of these catalogues, removing a portion of their technicalities, and presenting the residuum in a lively and striking form. Put this is nearly all. Even the oft-quoted panegyric of Horace[3] upon Pindar, with its famous images of the "mountain-torrent swollen by winter rains," and the "swan borne aloft by shifting breezes to the cloud-fields be-
