Nothing will show this more curiously than the words in which Sidney anticipated (and perhaps suggested) Ben’s censure of Spenser’s diction as to the _Shepherd’s Calendar_, especially if we remember that this was said by a personal friend and by an ardent lover of poetry. That there is something to be said against the dialect of the _Calendar_ all reasonable critics will allow. As a poetic language it is, at its best, but a preliminary exercise for the glorious medium of _The Faerie Queene_; it is awkwardly and in some cases incorrectly blended; and, above all, the _mere_ rusticity—the “hey-ho” and the rest—is a dangerous and doubtful expedient. But observe that Sidney says nothing of this kind. He “looks merely at the stop-watch.” Theocritus did not do it; Virgil did not do it; Sannazar did not do it; therefore Spenser must not do it. That his own elevation of a mere modern like Sannazar to this position of a lawgiver of the most tyrannic kind—of an authority not merely whose will is law, not merely whose prohibition is final, but whose bare abstention from something taboos that something from the use of all mankind for ever and ever,—that this did not strike Sidney as preposterous in itself, and as throwing doubt on the whole method, is wonderful. But even if he had stopped at Theocritus and Virgil, he would have been wrong enough. Here once more is the False Mimesis, the _prava imitatio_. Not only is the good poet to be followed in what he does, but what he does not do serves as a bar to posterity in all time from doing it. There is another point in which Sidney and Ben are alike, and in which they may even seem to anticipate that general adoption of “Reason,” of “Good Sense” as the criterion, which the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries claimed as their own, and which some recent critics have rather kindly allowed them. Sidney’s raillery of the romantic life-drama, Ben’s reported strictures on the sea-coast of Bohemia, and his certain ones on “Cæsar did never wrong,” &c., express the very spirit of this cheap rationalism, which was later to defray a little even of Dryden’s criticism, almost the whole of Boileau’s, and far too much of Pope’s. The ancients, to do them justice, are not entirely to be blamed for this. There is very little of it in Aristotle, who quite understands that the laws of poetry are not the laws of history or of science.[289] But there is a great deal of it in Horace: and, as we shall see, the authority of the great Greek was, during the three centuries which form the subject of this volume, more and more used as a mere cloak for the opinions of the clever Roman. Meanwhile, such books as those of Webbe and Puttenham, such an ordeal by battle as that fought out by Campion and Daniel, even such critical _jaculata_ as those of Meres and Bolton,[290] were all in different ways doing work, mistaken sometimes in kind, but always useful in general effect. ----- Footnote 289: