Politian’s critical faculty shows to more advantage here than in his attribution of the Epistles of the Pseudo-Phalaris to Lucian (see Bentley’s immortal _Dissertation_). He had almost better—from the literary point of view—have believed them genuine. ----- Neither purpose nor method can be regarded as wholly favourable to criticism. The popular _conférencier_ (for this term best expresses Politian’s position) is sure to be rather more of a panegyrist or a detractor, as the case may be, than of a critic; and the lecturer in verse is sure to be thinking rather of showing his own rhetorical and poetical gifts than of the strict merits and defects of his subject. But if we take the _Nutricia_ or the _Rusticus_, the _Ambra_ or the _Manto_, and compare any of them with the well-intentioned summary of the _Labyrinthus_,[27] we shall see without the least unfairness, and fully admitting the difference of ability and of opportunity in the two men, the difference, from the critical point of view, of the two stand-points. ----- Footnote 27: _V._ vol. i. p. 408. ----- In the “Manto,” the first of the _Sylvæ_, the most important characteristic of sixteenth-century Italian criticism proper, the exaltation of Virgil, is already prominent. [Sidenote: _The_ Manto.] Politian, indeed, was too much of a wit, and too much of a poet himself, to let his Virgil-worship take the gross and prosaic form which it assumed a little later in Vida. But he has proceeded a long way from the comparatively uncritical (and yet so more critical) standpoint of Dante. He comes to details. Cicero had won the palms of sweetness from Nestor and of tempestuous eloquence from Ulysses (a little vague this), but Greece consoled herself in poetry. Ennius was too rude to give Latium the glory of that. Then came Virgil. Even with the Syracusan reed (_i.e._, in his Eclogues) he crushes Hesiod and contends with Homer. Calliope took him in her arms as an infant, and kissed him thrice. Manto, the guardian nymph of his native place, hailed his advent, and summarised in prophetic detail his achievements in verse. Her town shall enter the lists—secure of victory—with the seven competitors for Homer’s origin. And then a whirlwind of magniloquent peroration (charged with epanaphora,[28] that favourite figure of the sixteenth century) extols the poet above all poets and all wonders of the world, past, present, and to come. ----- Footnote 28: _Aut_ telo, Summane, tuo traxere ruinam, _Aut_ trucibus nimbis aut iræ obnoxia Cauri, _Aut_ tacitis lenti perierunt dentibus ævi.