[150]. Padua, 1588. Denores (whose name is often separated into “de Nores”) was, like Patrizzi, a Professor of Philosophy, and, like Piccolomini, very polymathic and polygraphic. He had a year earlier published a Discourse (which I have not) on the Philosophical Principles of poetical kinds, and had very much earlier still, in 1553, commented the Epistola ad Pisones. His son Pietro was an affectionate and attentive disciple of Tasso’s in his last days at Rome.

[151]. I have not found much about Zinano near to hand, nor have I thought it worth while to go far afield in search of him. Tiraboschi (vii., 1716, 1900) names him as a poet-miscellanist in almost every kind. My copy, of 42 duodecimo pages, has been torn out of what was its cover, and may have been its company.

[152]. His Explanationes de Arte Poetica (Rome, 1587) are simply notes on Horace.

[153]. I have not yet been able to see L. Gambara, De Perfecta Poeseos Ratione (Rome, 1576), and I gather that Mr Spingarn was in the same case, as he refers not to the book, but to Baillet. According to that invaluable person (iii. 70), Gambara must have been an early champion of the uncompromisingly religious view of Poetry which appears in several French seventeenth-century writers, and in our own Dennis. The poet is not even to introduce a heathen divinity.

[154]. Venice, 1592-93.

[155]. Padua, 1600.

[156]. Cf. Butcher, op. cit., p. 297 and note.

CHAPTER IV.
THE CRITICISM OF THE PLÉIADE.

THE ‘RHETORICS’ OF THE TRANSITION—SIBILET—DU BELLAY—THE ‘DÉFENSE ET ILLUSTRATION DE LA LANGUE FRANÇAISE’—ITS POSITIVE GOSPEL AND THE VALUE THEREOF—THE ‘QUINTIL HORATIEN’—PELLETIER’S ‘ART POÉTIQUE’—RONSARD: HIS GENERAL IMPORTANCE—THE ‘ABRÉGÉ DE L’ART POÉTIQUE’—THE ‘PREFACES TO THE FRANCIADE’—HIS CRITICAL GOSPEL—SOME MINORS—PIERRE DE LAUDUN—VAUQUELIN DE LA FRESNAYE—ANALYSIS OF HIS ‘ART POÉTIQUE’—THE FIRST BOOK—THE SECOND—THE THIRD—HIS EXPOSITION OF ‘PLÉIADE’ CRITICISM—OUTLIERS: TORY, FAUCHET, ETC.—PASQUIER: THE ‘RECHERCHES’—HIS KNOWLEDGE OF OLDER FRENCH LITERATURE, AND CRITICISM OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH POETRY—MONTAIGNE: HIS REFERENCES TO LITERATURE—THE ESSAY ‘ON BOOKS.’

There is, perhaps, no more remarkable proof of the extraordinarily germinal character of Italian literature than the influence which it exercised on France in the department with which we here deal. The Rhetorics of the Transition. It is needless to say that the subsequent story of French literature has shown how deep and wide is the critical vein in the French literary spirit. But up to the middle of the sixteenth century this vein was almost absolutely irrepertum—whether sic melius situm or not. A few Arts of Poetry and Rhetoric had indeed been introduced across the Channel long before we had any on this side, as we should expect in a language so much more advanced than English, and as we have partly seen in the preceding volume. The Art de dittier of Eustache Deschamps, at the end of the fourteenth century, had been followed[[157]] throughout the fifteenth by others, some of them bearing the not uninteresting or unimportant title of “Seconde Rhétorique,” as distinguishing Poetics from the Art of Oratory. The chief of these,[[158]] almost exactly a century later than the treatise of Deschamps, used to be assigned to Henri de Croy, and is now (very likely with no more reason) handed over to Molinet. But they were almost entirely, if not entirely, occupied with the intricacies of the “forms” of ballade, &c., and included no criticism properly so called.