Piccolomini’s book,[145] which is a compact small quarto of 422 pages, differs in arrangement from Castelvetro’s merely in not giving the Greek—the _particelle_ of the original in translation being followed by solid blocks of _annotationi_. [Sidenote: _Piccolomini._] The author was of that well-known type of Renaissance scholar which aspired to a generous if perhaps impossible universalism; and as he puts this encyclopædic information at the service of his notes, they are naturally things not easily to be given account of in any small space, or with definite reference to a particular subject. That Piccolomini, however, was not destitute of acuteness or judgment to back his learning, reference to test passages will very easily show. He has not allowed the possible force of the μᾶλλον, for instance, to escape him in the Homer-and-Empedocles passage referred to a little earlier—indeed Maggi had put him in the right way here. But, in this and other cases, he is somewhat too fond of “hedging.” “We must remember this; but we must not forget that,” &c. The inspiriting downrightness of Scaliger on the one side, and Patrizzi on the other, is not in him; and we see the approach, in this subject also, of a time of mere piling up of authorities, and marshalling of arguments _pro_ and _con_, to the darkening rather than the illumination of judgment. ----- Footnote 145: _Annotationi di M. Alessandro Piccolomini nel Libro della Poetica d’Aristotele_: Vinegia. The dedication to Cardinal Ferdinand dei Medici is dated Ap. 20, 1572, from Piccolomini’s native town of Sienna, where he became co-adjutor-archbishop. Some of Salviati’s MS. observations, printed by Mr Spingarn, seem to show that even Piccolomini’s contemporaries regarded him as a little too _polymathic_, while his _Raffaella_ exhibits the less grave side of the Renaissance. But he was now getting an old man, and died six years later at the full three score and ten. -----