The importance of this manifesto, both symptomatically and typically, can hardly be exaggerated. [Sidenote: _Its minor shortcomings_] It exposes the temper of the generation which actually produced the first-fruits of the greatest Elizabethan poetry; it served as a stimulant and encouragement to all the successive generations of the great age. That Sidney makes mistakes both in gross and detail—that he even makes some rather serious mistakes from the mere “point of view of the examiner”—is of course undeniable. He has a good deal of the merely traditional mode of Renaissance respect for classical—and for some modern—authority. That, for instance, there is a good deal to be said, and that not only from the point of view of Ben Jonson, against Spenser’s half-archaic half-rustic dialect in the _Calendar_, few would refuse to grant. But Theocritus _did_ use dialect: it would not in the least matter whether either he or Virgil did not; and if it did, what has the modern and partly vernacular name of Sannazar to do with the matter? It can only be replied that Spenser, by permitting “E. K.'s” annotation, did much to invite this sort of criticism; and that Englishmen’s reluctance to rely on the inherent powers of the English language was partly justified (for hardly any dead poet but Chaucer and no dead prose-writers but Malory and perhaps Berners deserved the title of “great”), partly came from very pardonable ignorance. It has been already observed that Sidney is by no means peremptory about the “new versifying”; and in particular has absolutely none of the craze against rhyme as rhyme which animated persons of every degree of ability, from Milton to Stanyhurst, during more than a century. His remarks on versification are, however, too scanty to need much comment.