[473]. S. l. 1633, and continually reprinted.
[474]. Let me not be supposed for one moment to depreciate Latin verse-making. I hardly know (speaking from actual experience as a school-master) a single study which is better for boys; and the intelligent use of the gradus is a better discipline in observation, critical selection, and method, than smatterings of a hundred so-called “sciences.” But there is a time to put away childish things as well as a time to use them.
[475]. The copy of this which belongs to the University of Edinburgh has the additional interest of having belonged to, and of having been given by, Drummond of Hawthornden, and so of having been, not improbably, in the hands of Ben Jonson.
[476]. Commentariorum Rhetoricorum sive Oratoriarum Institutionum Libri Sex, 8vo, Dordrecht, 1609. But this was greatly enlarged in the 4to of Leyden, 1643, which I use.
[477]. De Artis Poeticæ Natura ac Constitutione, 4to, Amsterdam, 1647.
[478]. He has no room for much historical illustration, but what he says is generally sound, though it is odd that in mentioning the Christus Patiens (which, of course, he attributes to Gregory Nazianzen) he should not have noticed its cento character, and though his remarks on Muretus and Buchanan smack a little of the rival author of Herodes Infanticida.
[479]. Our whole history has shown us the obsession of the pius poeta, the vir bonus; but I think the uncompromising submission to it of the later seventeenth and eighteenth century is as much due to the influence of Voss as to that of any single mediate person.
[480]. Printed at Brieg and published at Breslau in 1624; reprinted as the first number of Niemeyer’s Neudrucke des xviten und xviiten Jahrhunderts, at Halle in 1886. The title of Prosodia Germanica, which the later editions bore, does not seem to be the author’s own.
[481]. For instance, the very interesting Grundlicher Bericht des Deutschen Meistergesangs of Adam Puschmann, edited by Herr Jonas for the same collection as No. 73 (Halle, 1888), is more than half a century older than Opitz’s book, having appeared at Görlitz in 1571. But Puschmann, a pupil of Hans Sachs himself, and active in the Masterschool, is only looking back on that school, the rules and regulations of which he lays down in the most approved fashion. “The face” of Opitz “meets the morning’s breath.”