But we must return to serious persons. Of the critical texts to which we pay chief attention in this book, there are not a few which are of far higher critical value than Vida’s _Poetics_.[35] [Sidenote: _Vida._] But it may be doubted whether even the similarly named treatises of Aristotle and of Horace have had a greater actual influence; and I at least am nearly certain that no modern treatise has had, or has yet had a chance of having, anything like so much. In the recently renewed study of Renaissance Criticism there has been, naturally enough, a repetition of a phenomenon familiar on such occasions—that is to say, the deflection of attention from pretty well-known if half-forgotten material to material which had been still more forgotten, and was hardly known at all. Daniello, Minturno, and the rest had, since the seventeenth century, rested almost undisturbed; even Castelvetro and Scaliger had more or less shrunk to the position of authorities, of some importance, in regard to ancient criticism. But Vida, owing to the unmistakable though unacknowledged borrowing of Boileau, the franker discipleship of Pope, and the inclusion of a very characteristic translation by Pitt among the usual collections of “British Poets,” had taken rank once for all. It is true that it was a rank somewhat of the museum order, but it existed. Now, the critics who followed him and refined upon him have been disinterred, and are enjoying their modest second vogue; and he is comparatively neglected, though a judicious American[36] has put him in modern dress once more between his master Horace and his pupil Boileau. ----- Footnote 35: For the Latin I use Pope’s _Selecta Poemata Italorum_ (2 vols., London, 1740), i. 131-189, and the anonymous _Poemata Selecta Italorum_ (Oxford, 1808), 207-266; for Pitt’s Englishing, Chalmers’s _Poets_, xix. 633-651. The original is Rome, 1527, 4to. Footnote 36: Prof. A. S. Cook (Boston, 1892). -----