Virgil and Cicero are very great writers, doubtless, but everybody does not feel much enthusiasm for the first, and some people do not feel much enthusiasm for the second. The curious perfection of Horace is, after all, as limited as it is curious—there are no vistas in it; and the same may be said of the easy flow of Livy, the artificial, and, for its range, intense idiosyncrasy of Sallust, and the artful fancy of Ovid. These six writers seem to have always attracted the lion’s share of Roman admiration, though at one time there might be a taste for the tricks, precious or slightly obscure, of Seneca in prose and Persius in verse, at another for other things. For their two most poetical poets, Lucretius and Catullus, the Romans never seem to have felt any deep or widespread admiration; their proseman of greatest genius, Tacitus, came too late, and was too unpopular in his sentiments, to attract much. Even so late as the latter days of Quintilian, when the Silver Age itself was drawing to a close, we find that it was customary to devote chief attention to Greek, and that it was thought necessary to argue for Latin as for a novice, who, if well trained and encouraged, might become a pretty fighter in time. As for Cicero’s time, there is no reason to suppose him an exception: yet we know how, when not in full public dress, he takes refuge in Greek at every moment, and sometimes seems almost inclined to echo a phrase of Ascham’s in the dawn of modern English letters, and say it would be “more easier” for him to write in Greek, as it was for the author of the _Toxophilus_ to have written in Latin. Footnote 276: I am not aware of any work, corresponding to Egger’s, in reference to Latin Criticism. But in English there is an Essay of the first excellence on the subject by the late Mr Henry Nettleship (reprinted at vol. ii. p. 44 of his _Lectures and Essays_, Oxford, 1895). In my case old personal obligations were not needed to deepen the admiration which every one, who would even like to be a scholar, must feel for Mr Nettleship’s work. I am here, however, to demur to his opening division of criticism into “criticism of philosophy, which investigates the principles of beauty,” and “isolated and spontaneous judgments, never rising beyond personal impression.” It is one main purpose of this book to show that a third course is possible and desirable, by way of the wide and systematic comparison of the manifestations of literary beauty in the accomplished work of letters.