[169]. Vit. Ap., vi. 19, ed. cit., i. 231: “Imagination, a wiser craftsmistress than Imitation, has done this; for Imitation will fashion what she sees, but Imagination what she has not seen, for she will suppose it according to the analogy of the real. Moreover, sudden disturbance (ἔκπληξις) will put Imitation’s hand out (ἔκκρούει), but not Imagination’s, for she goes on undisturbed to what she herself hypothetically conceived.” This is Shakespeare’s Imagination, whereof the lunatic, the lover, and the poet are all compact; it is not Addison’s, which deals only with things furnished by the sense of sight.
[170]. Ed. cit., ii. 128-219. The piece is sometimes cited as “Heroica.”
[171]. Besides the difficulty of obtaining Reiske’s ed., there is the further one that it is not complete. The Letters have to be sought in that of Wolf (Amsterdam, 1738), which is neither in the Library of the University of Edinburgh, nor in that of the Faculty of Advocates, nor in that of the Signet, so that it had to be run to earth in the British Museum, though I have since found a copy for sale. And even this combination is, I think, not exhaustive. The Progymnasmata, Meletæ, Dissertationes, &c., were published by Claude Morel, Paris, 1606; and there are many other editions of parts, but none of the whole.
[172]. See Photius on him, infra, p. [181].
[173]. De Quincey’s truculent attack on Greek rhetoricians generally (Essay on Rhetoric: Works, x. 31, 32) is less unjust to Libanius than to any one.
[174]. For mere completeness' sake I may refer here to other scholiastic Lives, of which the best known perhaps is that of Thucydides by Marcellinus. I do not think it rash to say that they all more or less bear out the contention put above as to the scholia generally.
[175]. Not to the piece mentioned above (p. 115), but to a lost oration. His own is at iii. 334 (Reiske).
[176]. I. 1, Reiske.
[177]. I. 442, Reiske.
[178]. Orationes, ed. Dindorf (Leipsic, 1832). Reiske, in a passage quoted at p. xii. of this, rates Themistius as, among other things, vanus jactator philosophiæ suæ, specie magis quam re cultæ, ineptus et ridiculus vexator et applicator Homeri et veteris historiæ, tautologus et sophista, &c. On the other hand, Sigismund Pandolf Malatesta, in 1464, carried off his bones from Sparta and buried them magnificently at Rimini as those Philosophorum sua tempestate principis. But it was for the Aristotelian Paraphrases, apparently, that the lover of Isotta revered Themistius. I have not neglected these (ed. Spengel, 2 vols., Leipsic, 1866), but being exclusively on the logical, physical, and metaphysical works, they yield us little that I can discover. I think Reiske is harsh, but not absolutely unjust.