[1]. At the beginning of Book III. I had practically no obligations to any general guide to confess; at the beginning of Book II. not very many. Here, as in the case of M. Egger in regard to Book I., I have cheerfully to acknowledge the forerunnership and help of Mr Joel Elias Spingarn, whose History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance appeared (New York and London) in 1899. I shall have occasion to differ with Mr Spingarn here and there; and his conception of a History of Criticism is not mine, just as, no doubt, mine is not his. But the obligations of the second treader of a previously untrodden path to the first are perhaps the greatest that fall to be acknowledged in any literary task; and I acknowledge them in Mr Spingarn’s case to the fullest extent possible.
[2]. The complaints sometimes made as to the ambiguity and want of authority of this term may have some justification; but convenience and (by this time) usage must be allowed their way.
[3]. Mr Froude in the opening of his History.
[4]. The complete text was, as is well known, not discovered (by Poggio at St Gallen) till the fifteenth century had nearly filled its second decade, but the book had been studied long before.
[5]. Very great influence on sixteenth, and even on seventeenth, century criticism has also been frequently, and perhaps correctly, assigned to the grammatical works and Terentian Scholia of Donatus.
[6]. Vol. i. p. 457 sq.
[7]. Spingarn, op. cit., p. 2. On the previous page there is the equally surprising statement that in the Middle Ages “Poetry was disregarded or contemned, or was valued, if at all, for qualities that least belong to it.” What were these “qualities”?
[8]. Vol. i. p. [414 note]
[9]. Vol. i. pp. 67, 68.
[10]. Erasmus is still only readable as a whole, or in combination of his really important literary work, in the folios of Beatus Rhenanus (8 vols., Basle, 1540-1) or Le Clerc (10 vols., Lyons, 1703-6). It is a thousand pities that this more important literary work, at least, has not been re-edited together accessibly and cheaply.