ass.
'Returning were as tedious as go o'er.' And any man might guess how
you would settle such a dilemma. It is, according to you, a little
oversight of your principal: '_humanum aliquid passus est._' We, on
the other hand, affirm that, if an error at all on the part of
Longinus, it is too monstrous for any man to have 'overlooked.' As
long as he could see a pike-staff, he must have seen that. And,
therefore, we revert to _our_ view of the case--viz. that it is
yourselves who have committed the blunder, in translating by the Latin
word _sublimis_[7] at all, but still more after it had received new
determinations under modern usage.

[Footnote 5: The beauty of this famous epigram lies in the _form_ of
the conception. The first had A; the second had B; and when nature, to
furnish out a third, should have given him C, she found that A and B
had already exhausted her cycle; and that she could distinguish her
third great favourite only by giving him both A and B in combination.
But the filling up of this outline is imperfect: for the A
(_loftiness_) and the B (_majesty_) are one and the same quality,
under different names.]

[Footnote 6: Because the Latin word _sublimis_ is applied to objects
soaring upwards, or floating aloft, or at an aerial altitude, and
because the word does _sometimes_ correspond to our idea of the
sublime (in which the notion of height is united with the notion of
moral grandeur), and because, in the excessive vagueness and lawless
latitudinarianism of our common Greek Lexicons, the word [Greek:
hypsos] is translated, _inter alia_, by [Greek: to] _sublime_,
_sublimitas_, &c. Hence it has happened that the title of the little
essay ascribed to Longinus, [Greek: Peri hypsous], is usually rendered
into English, _Concerning the sublime_. But the idea of the Sublime,
as defined, circumscribed, and circumstantiated, in English
literature--an idea altogether of English growth--the _sublime byway
of polar antithesis to the Beautiful_, had no existence amongst
ancient critics; consequently it could have no expression. It is a
great thought, a true thought, a demonstrable thought, that the
Sublime, as thus ascertained, and in contraposition to the Beautiful,
grew up on the basis of _sexual_ distinctions, the Sublime
corresponding to the male, the Beautiful, its anti-pole, corresponding
to the female. Behold! we show you a mystery.]

[Footnote 7: No word has ever given so much trouble to modern critics
as th