It is, however, from Cicero that Roman literary criticism, properly so called, begins,[277] and he, with Horace, almost exhausts [Sidenote: _Cicero._] our supply of it from the days before the Empire. Yet he prepares us for the disappointments which meet us in Latin criticism even more than in Greek. That Cicero’s interest in literature was great no one would dream of denying. His letters swarm with quotations and literary allusion; he is constantly arranging for new bookcases and new books; he no sooner has enforced (he never had much voluntary) leisure than he sets to work to write, to translate, to compose, to discuss. But the general inconveniences just noted, and some others of a particular nature, prevent him from being of much importance as a critic. He thought himself (as Quintilian later thought him) a philosopher, and he devoted much time to composing agreeable but extremely diluted copies of the Platonic dialogues. He was an orator not merely by profession but by taste, and he has left us (even excluding the pretty certainly spurious _Ad Herennium_) a very respectable bulk of Rhetorical work. But, as we shall presently see more in detail, most of this belongs altogether to the non-literary side of Rhetoric. Still, in default of some regular treatise (which was hardly to be expected), it is to his abundant, varied, and interesting correspondence that we should look for material, and we find very little of it. Here is a joke on the habit of Aristarchus (and indeed of other critics), the habit of marking as spurious anything they do not like: there an equally jocular introduction of rhetorical technicalities; elsewhere a rather curious but more linguistic than literary disquisition on the way in which innocent words and phrases acquire, half by accident, awkward double meanings, or slip into the single bad meaning only. There is a passage of some interest in a letter to Atticus about Cicero’s lost Greek history of his consulship, where he describes himself as having used up all Isocrates' perfume-shop, and the cabinets of his disciples, and even Aristotelian pigments.[278] Footnote 277: The actual primacy is assigned to a verse canon of the Ten Latin Comic Poets by a certain Volcatius Sedigitus, who may be close to 100 B.C. This “stupid production,” as Mr Nettleship unkindly but most justly calls it, may be found in his Essay (so often quoted) in Aulus Gellius, xv. 24, or in Baehrens' _Poetæ Latini Minores_, vi. 279. The six-fingered one puts Cæcilius first, Plautus second, Terence sixth, Ennius tenth, _antiquitatis causa_. He had, of course, borrowed the “canon” system from the Alexandrians, among whose most dubious services to criticism the arrangement of such things must be placed. There are touches of literary and critical reference in Ennius, in the Prologues of Terence, &c., but nothing that need delay us. Footnote 278: