His attitude[118] to the everlastingly vexed question of the connection of verse and poetry is very sensible, and practically anticipates, with less reluctant circumlocution, that of Coleridge, who in more things than one comes close to Castelvetro, and who probably knew him. [Sidenote: _The medium and end of Poetry._] He does not here contradict Aristotle by denying that verse is un-_essential_ to poetry. But he insists—and points out the undoubted truth that Aristotle’s practice, whatever his theory may do, admits this—that Verse is a kind of inseparable accident of poetry,—that it is the appropriate garb and uniform thereof, which cannot be abandoned without impropriety. And he takes up this attitude still more emphatically in regard to the closely connected, and still more important, question of the _end_ of Poetry. Here, as we have seen, the great Master of Criticism temporised. [Sidenote: _Uncompromising championship of Delight._] He did not doubt that this end was Delight: but in deference to idols, partly of the Cavern, partly of the Market-place, he yokes and hampers this end with moral improvement, with Imitation, itself for itself, and so on. Castelvetro is much more uncompromising. One shudders, almost as much as one rejoices, at the audacity of a critic who in mid-sixteenth-century calmly says, “What do beginning, middle, and end matter in a poem, provided it delights?”[119] Nay, Castelvetro has reached a point of view which has since been attained by very few critics, and which some who thought they had gained this peak in Darien first may be mildly chagrined to find occupied by him—the view that there are different _qualities_ of poetry, suited to delight different qualities of persons and of mind. ----- Footnote 118: Ibid., p. 23. Footnote 119: _Poet. d’Arist._, p. 158. ----- How seldom this view has been taken all critics ought to know, if they do not. Even now he who climbs the peak must lay his account with stone-throwing from the garrisons of other points. That Burns administers, and has a right to administer, one delight to one class of mind, Shelley another to another; that Béranger is not to be denied the wine of poetry because his vintage is not the vintage of Hugo: that Longfellow, and Cowper, and George Herbert are not to be sneered at because their delight is the delight of cheering but not of intoxication; that Keble is not intrinsically the less a poet because he is not Beddoes, or Charles Wesley because he is not Charles Baudelaire—or _vice versa_ in all the cases—these are propositions which not every critic—which perhaps not very many critics—will admit even in the abstract, and which in practice almost every critic falsifies and renounces at some time or other.[120] But they are propositions which follow fairly, and indeed inevitably, from Castelvetro’s theory of the necessary end, Delight, and the varying adjustment of the delighting agent to the patient’s faculty of being delighted.