Here again, as in the case of Cicero, it is necessary to break the rule of not entering upon controversy, lest by silence one [Sidenote: _Mr Nettleship’s estimate of it._] incur the blame of neglecting more than competent authority. As in that other case, Mr Nettleship’s estimate of the critical value of the _Dialogus_ (which he unhesitatingly attributes to Tacitus) is higher, though not so much higher, than mine. He ranks it with, but above, the _Brutus_, as “the two great documents of Latin criticism”: I should put both as such (though Cicero and Tacitus were both of them far cleverer than Quintilian) below the _Institutes_, and also below other things. The reason of the difference somewhat consoles me for the fact. Mr Nettleship was evidently bitten with that noble error, the belief that criticism of literature must be criticism of something that is _not_ literature. Tacitus seems to him to ask “under what social conditions great writing and great speaking arise,”—a most interesting question, but an excursus from criticism proper. “He sees clearly, and this is the important point which characterises the treatise, that literature must be taken and judged as the expression of national life, not as a matter of form and of scholastic teaching.” For “scholastic teaching” so be it: that also is extraneous to the central matter. But on the other point one must throw away the scabbard. Never will literature be judged adequately—seldom will it be, even within limits, judged accurately—as “an expression of national life.” From this and kindred fallacies come, and always have come, a brood of monsters, the folly, almost as great as its opposite, that “a poet must be a good man,” the folly that you can judge literature by remembering that there is much water-meadow in England[375]—hundreds of others. That literature is an expression of national life nobody need deny—that national life can never be estimated without an estimate of literature is, if anything, still more true. But literature is first of all literature, and it must be judged, like all other things, by the laws of its essence, and not by the laws of even its inseparable accidents. Footnote 375: Those who have an accurate memory of M. Taine’s _English Literature_ and of his _English Notes_ will not object to this apparent impossibility.