His main object, indeed (though he does not know it), is the defence, not so much of Poetry as of Romance. He follows the ancients in extending the former term to any prose fiction: but it is quite evident that he would have, in his _mimesis_, a quality of imagination which Aristotle nowhere insists upon, and which is in the best sense Romantic. And of this poetry, or romance, he makes one of the loftiest conceptions possible. All the hyperboles of philosophers or of poets, on order, justice, harmony, and the like, are heaped upon Poetry herself, and all the Platonic objections to her are retorted or denied.[243] ----- Footnote 243: Our two chief English-writing authorities, Mr Symonds and Mr Spingarn, are at odds as to Sidney’s indebtedness to the Italians. He quotes them but sparingly—Petrarch, Boccaccio, Landino, among the older writers, Fracastoro and Scaliger alone, I think, of the moderns—and Mr Symonds thought that he owed them little or nothing. Mr Spingarn, on the other hand, represents him as following them all in general, and Minturno in particular. As usual, it is a case of the gold and silver shield. My own reading of the Italian writers of 1530-80 leaves me in no doubt that Sidney knew them, or some of them, pretty well. But his _attitude_ is very different from theirs as a whole, and already significant of some specially English characteristics in criticism. ----- It has been said that there is no direct reference to Gosson in the _Apology_, though the indirect references are fairly clear. [Sidenote: _Abstract of it._] Sidney begins (in the orthodox Platonic or Ciceronian manner) somewhat off his subject, by telling how the right virtuous Edward Wotton, and he himself, once at the Emperor’s Court learnt horsemanship of John Pietro Pugliano, the Imperial Equerry, and recounting with pleasant irony some magnifying of his office by that officer. Whence, by an equally pleasant rhetorical turn, he slips into a defence of _his_ office—his “unelected vocation” of poet. Were not the earliest and greatest authors of all countries, Musæus, Homer, Hesiod, in Greece (not to mention Orpheus and Linus), Livius Andronicus and Ennius among the Romans, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch in Italy, Chaucer and Gower for “our English”—were they not all poets? Even the philosophers in Greece used poetry, and Plato himself is a poet almost against his will. Herodotus called his nine books after the Muses; and he and all historians have stolen or usurped things of poetry. Wales, Ireland, “the most barbarous and simple Indians,” are cited. Nay, further, did not the Romans call a poet _vates_, a “prophet”? and, by presumption, may we not call David’s psalms a divine poem? Whatever some may think,[244] it is no profanation to do so. For what is a poet? What do we mean by adopting that Greek title for him? We mean that he is a _maker_. All other arts and sciences limit themselves to nature; the