[235] T. Tasso, xii. 208.
[236] Accounts of this famous controversy will be found in Tiraboschi, Canello, Serassi, etc.; but the latest and most complete is that given in the twentieth chapter of Solerti's monumental Vita di Torquato Tasso, Torino, 1895.
[237] Nearly all the important documents of the Tasso controversy are reprinted in Rosini's edition of Tasso, Opere, vols. xviii.-xxiii.
[238] The question of unity was also raised in another controversy of the second half of the sixteenth century. A passage in Varchi's Ercolano (1570), rating Dante above Homer, started a controversy on the Divine Comedy. The most important outcome of this dispute was Mazzoni's Difesa di Dante (1573), in which a whole new theory of poetry is expounded in order to defend the great Tuscan poet.
CHAPTER V
THE GROWTH OF THE CLASSIC SPIRIT IN ITALIAN CRITICISM
The growth of classicism in Renaissance criticism was due to three causes,—humanism, or the imitation of the classics, Aristotelianism, or the influence of Aristotle's Poetics, and rationalism, or the authority of the reason, the result of the growth of the modern spirit in the arts and sciences. These three causes are at the bottom of Italian classicism, as well as of French classicism during the seventeenth century.