Footnote 265: I have more than once said that controversy or polemic in detail with other writers is forbidden here. But those who wish to see what has been said for Bacon will find most of the references in Messrs Gayley and Scott’s invaluable book. The panegyrists—from my honoured friend and predecessor, Professor Masson, to Mr Worsfold—all rely on the description of poetry above referred to, as “Feigned History,” with what follows on its advantages and on poetical justice, &c. All this seems to me, however admirably expressed, to be obvious and rudimentary to the _x_th and the _n_th. ----- Between Bacon and Ben may be best noticed the short _Anacrisis or Censure of Poets, Ancient and Modern_,[266] by Sir William Alexander, Earl of Stirling. [Sidenote: _Stirling’s_ Anacrisis.] It has received high praise;[267] but even those who think by no means ill of _Aurora_, may find some difficulty in indorsing this. It is simply a sort of “Note,” written, as the author says, to record his impressions during a reading of the poets, which he had undertaken as refreshment after great travail both of body and mind. He thinks Language “but the apparel of poesy,” thereby going even further than those who would assign that position to verse, and suggesting a system of “Inarticulate Poetics,” which he would have been rather put to it to body forth. He only means, however, that he judges in the orthodox Aristotelian way, by “the fable and contexture.” A subsequent comparison of a poem to a garden suggests Vauquelin de la Fresnaye (_v. supra_, p. 129), whom he may have read. Alexander is a sort of general lover in poetry; he likes this in Virgil, that in Ovid, that other in Horace; defends Lucan against Scaliger, even to the point of blaming the conclusion of the _Æneid_; finds “no man that doth satisfy him more than that notable Italian, Torquato Tasso”; admits the historical as well as the fictitious poetic subject; but thinks that “the treasures of poetry cannot be better bestowed than upon the apparelling of Truth; and Truth cannot be better apparelled to please young lovers than with the excellences of poetry.” Disrespectful language neither need nor should be used of so slight a thing, which is, and pretends to be, nothing more than a sort of table-book entry by a gentleman of learning as well as quality. But, if it has any “importance” at all, it is surely that of being yet another proof of the rapid diffusion of critical taste and practice, not of stating “theory and methods considerably in advance of the age.” If we could take extensively his protest against those who “would bound the boundless liberty of the poet,” such language might indeed be justified; but the context strictly limits it to the very minor, though then, and for long before and after, commonly debated, question of Fiction _v._ History in subject. ----- Footnote 266: