[584]. This word is most unluckily misprinted “litiria” in Mr Ferrers-Howell’s version.
[585]. Original, tenth and last of Latin Epistles, ed. Moore, p. 414. Those who wish for an English translation will find one in the Appendix to Miss Katharine Hillard’s translation of the Convito (p. 390, London 1889).
[586]. § 10. Remissus est modus et humilis quia loquutio vulgaris in qua et mulierculæ communicant.
[587]. Italian, ed. Moore, p. 235 sq. English, Miss Hillard, as above. There is the usual fighting about its date.
[588]. I. v. 3, at end.
[589]. Ibid., at beginning. The ground of exaltation is that same notion of the greater stability of Latin, of its being unlikely to “play the bankrupt with books,” which subsisted till the time of Bacon and Hobbes, if not of Johnson, though without the apparent justification it had in the Middle Ages.
[590]. I. x. 5.
[591]. It is not quite trivial that, as in the other case there is the dispute between Eloquium and Eloquentia, so there is here between Convito and Convivio.
[592]. I have not thought it necessary to devote any space to the consideration of the relations of Scholastic Philosophy to Criticism. To search the whole literature of Scholasticism for these would be an enormous labour; and some slight knowledge of the subject (to which I once hoped to devote much of the time and energy actually, but involuntarily, spent on things less worthy and less interesting) leads me to believe that it would be an almost wholly fruitless one. In Dante and in Boccaccio (v. infra) we have interesting examples of the bent which scholastic education gave to critics. Lully, or “Lull,” as they call him now (though he by no means rhymes to “dull”), shows (v. [note, p. 371]) how criticism afar off might strike a schoolman. But all the men of the schools abode in mere Rhetoric, and even that they mostly despised.