_Il Sogno, overo della Poesia_, by Gabriele Zinano,[151] dedicated at Reggio on the 15th October 1590 to the above-mentioned Ferrando Gonzaga of Guastalla, is a very tiny treatise, [Sidenote: _Zinano._] written with much pomp of style, but apparently unnoticed by most of the authorities on the subject. The author had studied Patrizzi (or Patrici, as he, too, calls him), and was troubled in his mind about Imitation, and about the equivocal position of Empedocles. He comforts himself as he goes on, and at last comes to a sort of eclectic opportunism, which extols the instruction _and_ delight of poetry, admits that it can practically take in all arts and sciences, but will not admit fable as making it without verse, or verse without fable, and denies that both, even together, make it necessarily good. The little piece may deserve mention for its rarity, and yet once more, as symptomatic of the hold which critical discussion had got of the Italian mind, Zinano is evidently full of the _Deca Istoriale_ and the _Deca Disputata_, but alarmed at their heresies. ----- Footnote 151: I have not found much about Zinano near to hand, nor have I thought it worth while to go far afield in search of him. Tiraboschi (vii., 1716, 1900) names him as a poet-miscellanist in almost every kind. My copy, of 42 duodecimo pages, has been torn out of what was its cover, and may have been its company. ----- Paolo Beni, the antagonist of Summo, the champion of prose for tragedy as well as for comedy, and a combatant in the controversy over the _Pastor Fido_, which succeeded in time, and almost equalled in tedium, that over the _Gerusalemme_, will come best in the next Book; and though I have not neglected, I find little to say about, Correa[152] and others.[153] [Sidenote: _Mazzone da Miglionico, &c._] A sign of the times is the somewhat earlier _I Fiori della Poesia_[154] of Mazzone da Miglionico (not to be confounded with the above-mentioned Mazzoni), a tightly packed quarto of five hundred pages, _plus_ an elaborate index. This is a sort of “Bysshe” _ante Bysshium_—a huge _gradus_ of poetic tags from Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, arranged ready for anybody who wishes to pursue the art of poetry according to the principles of Vida. Here you may find choice of phrases to express the ideas of “going to bed for the purpose of sleeping,” of “black and beautiful eyes,” of “shoes that hurt the feet,” and of “horses that run rapidly.” It was inevitable that this manual at once and _reductio ad absurdum_ of the mechanic Art of Poetical Imitation should come—indeed, others had preceded Mazzone, for instance Fabricius, in Germany (see next Book). But one cannot help invoking a little woe on those by whom it came. ----- Footnote 152: His _Explanationes de Arte Poetica_ (Rome, 1587) are simply notes on Horace. Footnote 153: