[85]. Ibid., “Infans quoque prius canit quam loquitur, videmus enim plerosque haud aliter somnum captare.”
[86]. See p. 347ᵃ.
[87]. Gerardi Joannis Vossii de artis poeticae natura ac constitutione ... Amstelodami, 1647. §4, “Atque ut multi ex solo metro male colligunt aliquem esse poetam: ita contrà aberrant alii, qui existimant, ne quidem requiri metrum, ut poeta aliquis dicatur. Haec tamen sententia à nonnullis ipsi tribuitur Aristoteli ... § 5. At alii censent Aristotelem numquam agnovisse ullum poema ἄμετρον....”
[88]. Isaaci Casauboni de Satyrica Graecorum Poesi & Romanorum Satira Libri duo, Parisiis, MDCV, pp. 352 f. “Certum heic discrimen statuitur inter eam orationem quae poema dici potest, & quae non potest, discrimen illud est metrum.... Omnem metro astrictam orationem & posse & debere poema dici.” The rest is instructive. Borinski, to be sure, Poetik d. Renaissance, p. 66, says that Casaubon wished to call Herodotus a poet; but a detached phrase of this sort—compare Scaliger’s epic in prose—goes for little when it fails to force the barrier and break down the writer’s definition. Dryden, on the other hand, making “invention” the sole test of poetry, clashes badly with his opinion (Essay on Satire) that “versification and numbers are the greatest pleasures of poetry.”
[89]. As Howell translates the not too clear Latin “fictio rhetorica in musicaque posita,” poetry is “a rhetorical composition set to music.” See also an article in the Quarterly Review, with reference to the Convivio, April, 1899, p. 303.
[90]. See his works, ed. Blanchemain, VII. 320.
[91]. The whole dispute about rime shows this “importance capitale” of verse itself.
[92]. Advancement of Learning, ed. Wright, II. iii. 4 (pp. 101 ff.). Clearer in the Latin version, his antithesis, “nam et vera narratio carmine, et ficta oratione soluta conscribi potest,” is not identical with the proposition that poetry is independent of rhythm. He says it “is in measure of words for the most part restrained.”
[93]. De Poematum Cantu et Viribus Rythmi, Oxon., 1673. The reference to origins is interesting: “illud quidem certum omnem poësin olim cantatum fuisse.... Unde sequitur, quicquid non canitur aut cantari nequeat, non esse poema.”
[94]. Characteristics, 5th ed., Birmingham, 1763, I. 254, note, and III. 264.