And how necessary that division was may be seen from the
length at which Plato discusses the nature of the distinction in the
second book of the Republic. Even Aristotle, in this as in other things
the 'master of those who know', devotes no inconsiderable space of the
Poetics to technical matters such as the analysis of vocal sounds, and
the aptness of different metres to different forms of poetic thought.
There is another matter in which the methods of Elizabethan critics
run side by side with those of the early Greeks. In Plato and Aristotle
we are not seldom startled by the sudden transition from questions of
form to the deepest problems suggested by imaginative art. The same
is true of the Elizabethan critics. It is doubtless true that the
latter give a proportionally larger space to the more technical sides
of the subject than their Greek forerunners. They could not reasonably
be expected to write with the width of view that all the world has
admired in Aristotle and Plato. Moreover, they were from the first
confronted with a practical difficulty from which the Greek critics
were so fortunate as to be free.
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