It is on the first point that I wish to make a slight digression. It is evident from the epithets that he uses in regard to them, such as “stupid,” “trifling,” “vicious,” that these processes of placing and of comparison were not to Mr Nettleship’s taste. I shall myself admit that the addiction of Greek, and still more of Latin, criticism to them seems to me to be among the very greatest weaknesses of both. But I must add a distinction which is constantly forgotten, and which I am not sure that Mr Nettleship himself had in mind. The “placing” of A, B, C, and D in order of merit is “stupid” and “trifling” enough; the still further awarding of seventh place to A for Somethingity, and of third to B for Somethingelseness, is more stupid and more trivial still. Nor is that comparative criticism, the _locus classicus_ of which is perhaps M. Taine’s ejaculation, “J’aime mieux Alfred de Musset,” as a criticism on Tennyson, any better; in fact, as being not merely sterile and jejune, but illogical and actively misleading, it is considerably worse. But there _is_ a placing and there _is_ a comparison, which are two very different things—which are, in fact, the two highways of all real literary criticism. The placing is that which sets a man, not in the first division of the first class, or the second of the third, but in his relations to time and country, to language and manner, to predecessors and successors—to the whole literary map in larger or smaller circumference. The comparison is that which does not work out a performer’s rank, but disengages his qualities. These are the methods to which all the great critics have perforce resorted, and which have made them great. That there is less of them than there should be in ancient criticism may be true enough; that the want of them (with perhaps a little want also of sympathy with the highest poetry) is what prevents Aristotle from being the greatest critic of all time, is true enough; that the presence of them in Longinus is one of the main secrets of his unmatched quality, is true enough. But they are very different things from the enumeration of Volcatius Sedigitus, and from the _in argumentis Cæcilius in ethesin Terentius in sermonibus Plautus_ of Varro.[302] Footnote 302: Varro was happier in the phrase _filo et facetia sermonis_ applied to Plautus: and he seems to have been genuinely devoted to the dramatist whose canon he constituted, _v._ _Noctes Atticæ_, III. iii. CHAPTER II. THE CONTEMPORARIES OF QUINTILIAN. PETRONIUS—SENECA THE YOUNGER—THE SATIRISTS—PERSIUS—THE PROLOGUE AND FIRST SATIRE—EXAMINATION OF THIS—JUVENAL—MARTIAL—THE STYLE OF THE EPIGRAMS—PRÉCIS OF THEIR CRITICAL CONTENTS—STATIUS—PLINY THE YOUNGER—CRITICISM IN THE ‘LETTERS’—THE ‘DIALOGUS DE CLARIS ORATORIBUS’—MR NETTLESHIP’S ESTIMATE OF IT—THE GENERAL LITERARY TASTE OF THE SILVER AGE—“FAULTLESSNESS”—ORNATE OR PLAIN STYLE.