The _Topica Poetica_ of Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano[146] comes well next to Piccolomini, because the pair are characteristic examples of the two parallel lines in which, as we have seen throughout, Italian criticism proceeds during the century. [Sidenote: _Gilio._] In plan it presents no inconsiderable resemblance to that work of our own Puttenham (_v. infra_) which followed it at no great interval; but it is, as its special title will have indicated to the expert, even more definitely rhetorical. In fact, it must be one of the very latest treatises in which, on the partial precedent of antiquity, Poetics are brought _directly_ under Rhetoric. We actually start with accounts, illustrated by poetical examples in the vernacular, of the Deliberative, Demonstrative, and Judicial kinds; we pass thence to Invention, Imitation, and Style; and thence again to Decorum, the Proper, and so forth, all still illustrated from the vulgar tongue mainly, but with a Latin example here and there. And this finishes the short First Book. The longer Second is the most strictly “topical,” with its sections (at first sight bewildering to the modern non-expert mind) on Definition and Etymology, on Genus and Species, on Example and Induction, on Proceeding from Less to Greater and from Greater to Less, on Amplification, Authority, Custom, and Love. The Third is wholly on Figures of Speech, and the Fourth on Tropes or Figures of “Conceit.” The poetical illustration is all-pervading, and there is an odd appendix of sonnets from ladies of Petrarch’s time. The book is chiefly worth notice here because, as has been said, it is one of the latest—perhaps, with the exception of Puttenham’s own, the actually latest—of its special subdivision that we shall have to notice,—the subdivision, that is to say, in which the literature handled is absolutely subordinate to an artificial system of classification, in which the stamped and registered ticket is everything, so that, when the critic has tied it on, his task is done. ----- Footnote 146: In Venetia, 1580. Why has Time, in the title-page woodcut of this, an hour-glass as head-dress, but a scourge instead of a scythe in his hand? -----