In his Fifth Book Patrizzi tackles a matter of far greater importance—for after all the discussion, “Is Poetry Imitation, or is it not?” is very mainly a logomachy. As Miss Edgeworth’s philosophic boy remarks, “You may call your hat your cadwallader,” when you have once explained that by this term you mean “a black thing that you wear on your head.” But the question of this Fifth Book, “Whether Poetry can be in prose?” is of a very different kind. It goes, not to words but to things, and to the very roots of them; it involves—if it may not be said actually to _be_—the gravest, deepest, most vital question of literary criticism itself; and on the answer given to it will turn the further answer which must be given to a whole crowd of minor questions. On this point _il gran Patricio_ has at least this quality of greatness, that he knows his own mind with perfect clearness, and expounds it as clearly as he knows it. His conclusion[128] is, “That verse is so proper and so essential to every manner of poetry that, without verse, no composition either can or ought to be Poetry.” This is refreshing, whether we consider that Patrizzi has taken the best way of establishing his dogma or not. He proceeds as usual by posing and examining the places—four in number—in which Aristotle deals with the question; and discusses them with proper exactness from the verbal point of view, dwelling specially, as we should expect, on the term ψιλὸς for prose. Then, as we should expect also, he enters into a still longer examination of the very obscure and difficult passage about the Mimes and the Socratic Dialogues. To say that the argument is conducted in a manner wholly free from quibbling and wire-drawing would perhaps be too much. Patrizzi—and his logic is certainly not the worse for it—was still in the habit of bringing things to directly syllogistic head now and then; and of this modern readers are too often impatient. But he does succeed in convicting Aristotle of using language by no means wholly consistent; and he succeeds still better in getting and keeping fast hold of that really final argument which made De Quincey so angry when Whately so forcibly put it[129]—the argument that from time immemorial everybody, who has had no special point to prove, when speaking of a poem has meant something in verse, that everybody, with the same exception, has called things in verse poems. ----- Footnote 128: _Deca Disputata_, p. 122. Footnote 129: See Whately, _Rhetoric_, III. iii. 3, p. 216 (ed. 8, London, 1857), and De Quincey, _Rhetoric_ (_Works_, ed. Masson, x. 131). -----