Yet it would be an act of the grossest injustice and ingratitude to refuse or to stint recognition of the immense services that the Italians rendered to criticism at this time. It was, in their own stately word, a veritable case of _risorgimento_; and of resurrection in a body far better organised, far more gifted, than that which had gone to sleep a thousand years before. In the year 1500 we may look over Europe and find criticism really alive and awake _nusquam et nullibi_—at best fast asleep, and dreaming a little with the dreams of Gavin Douglas or (had he lived a couple of years longer) of Savonarola, or of such more infantine persons as Augustine Käsenbrot. In 1600 criticism is a classed and recognised department of literature; Faustino Summo, in the very year, can quote authority after authority, refer—as to a sort of common law of the subject—to _dicta_ and _obiter dicta_ of nearly three generations of distinguished judges. And Italian criticism has colonised: its colonies, with the virtues of that kind, are showing characteristics sometimes quite different, though derived from those of the mother country, and are carrying the critical torch round the world. No matter for the moment whether the more perfect way has been reached, or the less perfect way declined upon. The time of “liking grossly,” of composing anyhow, has passed: that of critical study of the old, and critical reception of the new, has begun. Never, therefore, shall I join in the anathema in which De Quincey[285] has coupled Italian critics with Greek rhetoricians. In fact, the Italians suffer far more unjustly than the Greeks. Castelvetro and Patrizzi alone would be enough to clear their company handsomely: Capriano, Cinthio Giraldi, Minturno could put in quite sufficient bail on their own recognisances: yet others would leave the court more than recommended to mercy.[286] I disagree with many of the principles of most of them; I wish that even those with whom I agree had opened their eyes wider, kept them more steadily on the object, and cared less about fighting abstract prizes, and more about appreciating the goods which the gods had given them in concrete literature. It was also a misfortune, no doubt, that no man of very distinct genius and whole-hearted devotion gave himself up to the business. Vida was a good kind of pedant, and Trissino at heart a philologist; Daniello, Capriano, and most of the rest, including even Minturno, down to Denores and Summo, persons of respectable talent merely; Fracastoro, a man of science; Cinthio, a novelist and miscellanist; Scaliger, a not quite so good kind of more deeply-dyed pedant; Castelvetro, a scholar, with the scholar’s quarrelsomeness; Patrizzi, a philosopher primarily; Torquato Tasso himself, a great poet, with, for a poet, a sensible and logical but curiously timid and hesitating mind. Not a few of them did great things for Criticism; all together they did a really mighty thing for