But he had also acuteness and taste. I do not know a better example in little of the latter quality at the time than his short and scornful description[109] of a preposterous comparison by another critic, Bartolommeo Riccio, between the “Sparrow” of Catullus and a pretty but commonplace poem of Navagero on a dog. [Sidenote: _The Opere Varie._] One may sigh over the ruling passion, not to say the original sin, of critical man, on passing from this to a tangle of recrimination and “that’s _my_ thunder” which follows with reference to Riccio and Pigna and Cinthio. But this passes again into a solid discussion on the material and form of poetry, and on the office of the Muses. Many of these animadversions are, as we should expect, purely verbal, sometimes not beyond the powers of the _grammaticuccio_, of whom Castelvetro himself not unfrequently talks with piquant scorn. But the comfort of finding annotations on Virgil alternating with discourses on Dante, like that of placing a quarto on Petrarch side by side with one on Aristotle, more than atones for any occasional hair-splitting. We are at last in the Jerusalem of general Literature which is the mother of us all, which is free and universal; not in this or that separatist Samaria or exclusive Hebron. The Platonic annotations, which are numerous, are important, because they show just the other side of Castelvetro’s talent from the merely verbal one—almost the whole of them being devoted to the exposition and illustration of meaning. It is a great pity that he did not work his notes[110] on the _Gorgias_ (which he regards expressly as Plato’s _Rhetoric_) into a regular treatise of contrast and comparison on this subject between Aristotle and Plato. But all these notes show us the qualification of the commentator to deal with so difficult a subject as the _Poetics_. ----- Footnote 109: _Op. Var._, p. 83 _sq._ Footnote 110: _Op. Var._, pp. 288-306. -----