[185]. Some abatement, however, may be claimed, if only on the ground that Laudun is absolutely sound on the vernacular question.
[186]. M. Pellissier, to whose already cited edition the references following are made.
[187]. I agree with Mr Spingarn (p. 187) and disagree with M. Pellissier (p. xxxviii) in thinking that this reference to Minturno is quite serious. The French editor, indeed, speaks of Minturno rather oddly, coupling him with Vida as “les deux poètes Italiens,” and saying that both “ne font que remâcher les préceptes des anciens,” which Vauquelin only says of Vida. This is of more than doubtful justice as to Minturno, and why call him a “poet”? He may have written in verse on other occasions, for aught I know, but his two Poetics are as unquestionably in prose as Vida’s one is in verse.
[188]. Oste moy la Ballade, oste moy le Rondeau.
[189]. Inst. Orat., II. xiii. 13. The anecdote in Quintilian is very simple: Apelles paints Antigonus in profile to hide a lost eye. Vauquelin (on uncertain authority) expands this into a long story of a competition between Polygnotus, Scopas, and Diocles.
[190]. The Recherches have not been completely reprinted, I think, since 1723. All their literary matter, however, is included in M. Léon Feugère’s extremely useful and well-edited Œuvres Choisies d’E. P. (2 vols., Paris, 1849). It extends from i. 230 to ii. 134, what follows on the University of Paris being itself not quite irrelevant.
[191]. Difficult, that is, to appraise critically—not to understand.
[192]. Vol. i. p. 165, ed. Courbet and Royer. Je n’aime point cette suffisance relative et mendiée, he goes on with his own absolute and unborrowed stamp of phrase and epithet.
[193]. Cf., for instance, the remarkable critical comparison of Tacitus and Seneca in the Eighth Essay of the Third Book, towards the close (iv. 37 ed. cit.)
[194]. If there is anywhere a happier critical phrase, in its particular kind, than “cette noble circumfusa, mère du gentil infusus,” I do not know it.