Giacomo Mazzoni is perhaps better known[147] than at least some of the subjects of this chapter, owing to his connection with [Sidenote: _Mazzoni._] Dante. He first, in 1573, published at Cesena a brief _Difesa di Dante_ of some fifty folios, in fairly large print, and followed it up fourteen years later with an immense _Della Difesa_, containing 750 pages of very small print without the index. The points of the actual _Difesa_ are not uncurious—such as an argument that discourses on Poetry are not improper for the philosopher, and that Dante is a particularly philosophical poet, in fact encyclopædic. From the Imitation point of view the Comedy can be easily defended, as it is a real following of action, and not the mere relation of a dream: and as dealing with _costume_ (manners) it is a comedy, not a tragedy or heroic poem. The _Della Difesa_, on the other hand, is a wilderness of erudition and controversy, arranged under abstract heads (“how the poets have conducted themselves towards the predicaments of Time and Place,” &c.), and diverging into inquiries and sub-inquiries of the most intricate character—the trustworthiness of dreams,[148] the opinions held of them in antiquity, the nature and kinds of allegory, Dante’s orthodoxy—in short, all things Dantean, and very many others. If I cannot with Mr Spingarn[149] discover “a whole new theory of poetry” in the _Difesa_ itself, I am ready to admit that almost anything might be discovered in the _Della Difesa_. ----- Footnote 147: Milton had read Mazzoni, and cites him. Footnote 148: There is a large folding table of the causes and kinds of visions. Footnote 149: _Op. cit._, p. 124. -----