Gildersleeve on Aelian

"Cobet is perfectly safe in sneering at his Atticism, and yet the unprejudiced modern must admit that he is not a bad story-teller. But many of the post-classic people are good story-tellers, perhaps because they have the bad taste to be so much like us..."

I adore Gildersleeve. Pick up a copy of his work in the library, and look at the photograph on the inside, and I'm willing to bet that, unlike so many other 19th c. scholars, he is smiling.