Since I wrote this, an obliging correspondent, Mr P.G. Thomas of Liverpool, has suggested actual quotation of a passage of Bruni’s on prose style in his _De Studiis et Literis_. If I do not give this it is, first, because indulgence in quotation here is as the letting out of waters; and, secondly, because the tractate is translated in Mr W. H. Woodward’s well-known and excellent book on _Vittorino da Feltre_ (Cambridge, 1897), where other matter of interest to us will also be found. ----- The tendency of each could be anticipated by any one who, though actually ignorant of it, knew the characteristics of the two men in other ways. [Sidenote: _Savonarola._] Fra Girolamo’s, of course, is wholly ethical-religious, mainly neo-Platonic, but already presenting the effect of Aristotelian details on the general Platonic attitude to Poetry. Yet he is still scholastic in his general treatment of the subject, and still adopts that close subordination of poetry to Logic which is as old as Averroes and Aquinas, and which, odd as it may seem to merely modern readers, is a very simple matter when examined.[20] He disclaims, as usual, any attack on poetry itself, urging only the abuse of poetry; but he follows Plato in looking more than askance at it, and Aristotle in denying its necessary association with verse. The Scriptures are the noblest poetry; all ancient poetry is doubtfully profitable. In fact, he regards poetry altogether as specially liable to abuse, and dubiously admissible into, or certainly to be expelled from, a perfect community, such as that on which the fancy of the Renaissance was so much fixed. ----- Footnote 20: The connecting and explaining link, sometimes omitted, is to be found in _Rhetoric_—the close connection of which with Logic and Grammar is no puzzle, while the connection of poetry with it was then an accepted fact. It is rather dangerous to say that Savonarola, in connecting poetry with logic, was “tending towards the elimination of the Imagination in art.” The extremely equivocal nature of the word “Imagination” (_v._ vol. i. pp. 120, 165) needs constantly to be pointed out. In the ancient sense, Imagination is as much connected with Logic as anything else; in the modern, Savonarola probably never even thought of it. -----