"  Critics,  in  supposing  that  improvements  were  constantly  made  in
poetry  by  the  successors  of  the  first  great  masters,  add  an  apex  to  the
accumulated  foolery  of  ages.  Thus  not  only  was  Virgil  preferred  to
Homer  (and  especially  in  those  very  qualities  in  which  he  is  most  sig-
nally the  inferior),  but  Euripides  to  Sophocles,  and  Sophocles  to  ^Eschylus.
