There are, however, few propositions in literature truer than this—that it is of no present use to be wise for the future. [Sidenote: Sed contra mundum.] If a man chooses the wisdom of the morrow, he must be content for the morrow to appreciate him—which it does not always, though no one but a poor creature will trouble himself much about that. Patrizzi had a really considerable reputation, and deserved it; but in matters literary he was two hundred years in front of his time, and his time avenged itself by taking little practical notice of him.[140] The critical writers of the last fifteen or twenty years of the century are fairly numerous; and though none of them can pretend to great importance, the names of some have survived, and the writings of some of these are worth examination, certainly by the historian and perhaps by the student. But the general drift of them is usually anti-Patrician and pro-Aristotelian, in that very decidedly sophisticated interpretation of Aristotle which was settling itself down upon the world as critical orthodoxy. [Sidenote: _The latest group of sixteenth-century Critics._] Among them we may mention one or two which, though actually earlier than Patrizzi, are later than Castelvetro, and will help to complete, as far as we can here attempt it, the conspectus of that remarkable flourishing time of Italian critical inquiry which actually founded, and very nearly finished, the edifice of European criticism generally for three centuries at least. The authors to whom we return are Partenio, Viperano, Piccolomini, Gilio da Fabriano, and Mazzoni; those to whom we proceed are Jason Denores, Gabriele Zinano, and Faustino Summo. This latter, who, with an odd coincidence of name, date, and purport, does really sum up the sixteenth century for Aristotle, and so govern the decisions of the seventeenth and eighteenth, had been immediately preceded in the same sense by Buonamici,[141] Ingegneri,[142] and others. ----- Footnote 140: The way in which Patrizzi is referred to after the lapse of a century by Baillet and Gibert (_v. inf._, p. 320) shows at once the sort of _magni nominis umbra_ which still made itself felt, and the absence of any definite knowledge to give body to the shade. For his dealings with Rhetoric, see next Book, p. 329. Footnote 141: _Discorsi Poetici_, 1597. Footnote 142: _Poesia Rappresentativa_, 1598. -----