The controversy, like that between Caro and Castelvetro, and (I fear it must be said) like literary controversies in general, did not pass off without a muddying of the waters. Salviati, Tasso’s chief adversary, and author of the dialogue _L’Infarinato_ against him, had at first been a great admirer and almost flatterer of the _Gerusalemme_, had offered the author his friendship, had praised his scheme, and had actually proposed to celebrate it in that very commentary on the _Poetics_ which Mr Spingarn (who has read it in MS.) describes as actually devoted to “undermining Tasso’s pretensions.” Exactly by what personal, or cliquish, or patriotic offences he was induced to take the opposite line, belongs to the obscure, dull, and disgusting history of these literary squabbles generally, and we need not concern ourselves with it. The points “for us” in the whole matter are, first, that the controversy shows the strong hold which a certain conception of criticism (whether the right one or not) had obtained of the Italian mind; and, secondly, that the main question on which it turned—“What _sort_ of Unity heroic poems must have?”—“In what manner must the precepts of Aristotle be interpreted and adjusted?”—shows more than the shadow of coming Neo-Classicism. The path of safety and truth which Giraldi and Pigna had opened up many years earlier, and which even Castelvetro, Unitarian as he was, had been careful to leave open—the path starting, that is to say, from the positions that Aristotle had not all literature before him, and that the kinds of literature which he had not before him could not, therefore, be subject to his dicta—was now ignored or barred. _Apparent diræ facies_, the faces of the Unities, and there is nothing left to do, in the general opinion, but to wrangle about their exact lineaments.