One writer of famous memory who belongs to this period—who [Sidenote: _Varro._] indeed was older even than Cicero—has been hitherto unmentioned, because, as a matter of fact, we have practically no literary criticism remaining from him, and that is Varro. I should myself have been disposed to relegate the author of the _De Re Rustica_ and the _De Lingua Latina_ to the place of his brother (or grandson) grammarians; but this might seem unceremonious in face of the importance of the critical position which Professor Nettleship assigned to him. It is, perhaps, also a convenient place to notice the exact character of that importance. As in so many other cases, if we went by titles only, and by guesswork from them, Varro must certainly have a high rank. “On Poets,” “On Poems,” “On Characters” (in the technical Greek sense of literary _differentia_?), “On Scenic Action,” “Plautine Questions,” might seem at first sight likely to be, if we had them, a very El Dorado of Latin criticism. But the few surviving fragments are a little discouraging. That Varro would be fertile in grammatical, mythological, social explanation, we may be quite certain. But the fragments seldom go much farther. The report, quoted by Quintilian, of Ælius Stilo’s saying that if the Muses wrote Latin they would write in the language of Plautus, is one of those rather irritating critical catchwords which carry with them the minimum of critical illumination. It is, in fact, only an _ad captandum_ fashion of saying that the speaker liked Plautus, or wanted to pay him a compliment at the moment. Most of the others seem (as indeed Mr Nettleship saw) to be merely examples, either of the habits of “placing” authors in this or that rank, of comparing them with this or that other, from which criticism has suffered many things and gained few, or else of the not much less barren classification of kinds.