hollow and affected, is always objectionable, whether in
material bodies or in writings, and in danger of producing on us an
impression of littleness: "nothing," it is said, "is drier than a man
with the dropsy."

The characteristic, then, of bombast is that it transcends the Sublime:
but there is another fault diametrically opposed to grandeur: this is
called puerility, and it is the failing of feeble and narrow
minds,--indeed, the most ignoble of all vices in writing. By puerility
we mean a pedantic habit of mind, which by over-elaboration ends in
frigidity. Slips of this sort are made by those who, aiming at
brilliancy, polish, and especially attractiveness, are landed in
paltriness and silly affectation.

5
Closely associated with this is a third sort of vice, in dealing with
the passions, which Theodorus used to call false sentiment, meaning by
that an ill-timed and empty display of emotion, where no emotion is
called for, or of greater emotion than the situation warrants. Thus we
often see an author hurried by the tumult of his mind into tedious
displays of mere personal feeling which has no connection with the
subject. Yet how justly ridiculous must an author appear, whose most
violent transports leave his readers quite cold! However, I will dismiss
this subject, as I intend to devote a separate work to the treatment of
the pathetic in writing.

IV

The last of the faults which I mentioned is frequently observed in
Timaeus--I mean the fault of frigidity. In other respects he is an able
writer, and sometimes not unsuccessful in the loftier style; a man of
wide knowledge, and full of ingenuity; a most bitter critic of the
failings of others--but unhappily blind to his own. In his eagerness to
be always striking out new thoughts he frequently falls into the most
childish absurdities.

2
I will only instance one or two passages, as most of them have been
pointed out by Caecilius. Wishing to say something very fine about
Alexander the Great he speaks of him as a man "who annexed the whole of
Asia in fewer years than Isocrates spent in writing his panegyric
oration in which he urges the Greeks to make war on Persia." How strange
is the comparison of the "great Emathian conqueror" with an Athenian
rhetorician! By this mode of reasoning it is plain that the Spartans
were very inferior to Isocrates in courage, since it took them thirty
years to conquer Messene, while he finished the composition of this
harangu