hor, who certainly would have rejected Boileau's compliment
when he selects Longinus as a literary dictator.

Indeed we almost grudge our author's choice of a subject. He who wrote
that "it was not in nature's plan for us, her children, to be base and
ignoble; no, she brought us into life as into some great field of
contest," should have had another field of contest than literary
criticism. It is almost a pity that we have to doubt the tradition,
according to which our author was Longinus, and, being but a
rhetorician, greatly dared and bravely died. Taking literature for his
theme, he wanders away into grammar, into considerations of tropes and
figures, plurals and singulars, trumpery mechanical pedantries, as we
think now, to whom grammar is no longer, as of old, "a new invented
game." Moreover, he has to give examples of the faults opposed to
sublimity, he has to dive into and search the bathos, to dally over
examples of the bombastic, the over-wrought, the puerile. These faults
are not the sins of "minds generous and aspiring," and we have them with
us always. The additions to Boileau's preface (Paris, 1772) contain
abundance of examples of faults from Voiture, Mascaron, Bossuet,
selected by M. de St. Marc, who no doubt found abundance of
entertainment in the chastising of these obvious affectations. It hardly
seems the proper work for an author like him who wrote the Treatise on
the Sublime. But it is tempting, even now, to give contemporary
instances of skill in the Art of Sinking--modern cases of bombast,
triviality, false rhetoric. "Speaking generally, it would seem that
bombast is one of the hardest things to avoid in writing," says an
author who himself avoids it so well. Bombast is the voice of sham
passion, the shadow of an insincere attitude. "Even the wretched phantom
who still bore the imperial title stooped to pay this ignominious
blackmail," cries bombast in Macaulay's _Lord Clive_. The picture of a
phantom who is not only a phantom but wretched, stooping to pay
blackmail which is not only blackmail but ignominious, may divert the
reader and remind him that the faults of the past are the faults of the
present. Again, "The desolate islands along the sea-coast, overgrown by
noxious vegetation, and swarming with deer and tigers"--do, what does
any one suppose, perform what forlorn part in the economy of the world?
Why, they "supply the cultivated districts with abundance of salt." It
is as comic as--