To a certain extent it would seem that even as Chronicles (q.v.) has passed through the hands of one who was keenly interested in the Temple service, so the other historical books have been shaped not only by the late priestly writers (symbolized in literary criticism by P), but also by rather earlier writers, also of priestly sympathies, but of " southern " or half-Edomite affinity.
In 1684 Bayle began the publication of his Nouvelles de la republique des lettres, a kind of journal of literary criticism.
No canon of literary criticism can treat as valuable external evidence an attestation which first appears so many centuries after the supposed date of the poems.
In literary criticism pure and simple his principal work is the Commentaire sur Corneille, though he wrote a good deal more of the same kind - sometimes (as in his Life and notices of Moliere) independently sometimes as part of his Siecles.
The general results of the last fifty years of the first period (130 to 80) may be thus summed up. In poetry we have the satires of Lucilius, the tragedies of Accius and of a few successors among the Roman aristocracy, who thus exemplified the affinity of the Roman stage to Roman oratory; various annalistic poems intended to serve as continuations of the great poem of Ennius; minor poems of an epigrammatic and erotic character, unimportant anticipations of the Alexandrian tendency operative in the following period; works of criticism in trochaic tetrameters by Porcius Licinus and others, forming part of the critical and grammatical movement which almost from the first accompanied the creative movement in Latin literature, and which may be regarded as rude precursors of the didactic epistles that Horace devoted to literary criticism.
