Of three things, however, the one is absolutely incontestable as a fact, and the other two are not easily, I think, to be gainsaid by competent authority. [Sidenote: _Importance of the_ Poetics.] The first is, that Vida anticipates in time even the earliest of the prose critics of the new Italian school by some couple of years, while he anticipates the main group of these critics by more than twenty. The second is, that though no doubt he took some impulse from Politian and other Humanists, he is practically the first to codify that extravagant Virgil-worship which reigned throughout the Neo-Classical dispensation. The third is that, not merely in this point but in others, he seems, by a sort of intuition, to have anticipated, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, almost the whole critical orthodoxy of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth. It is this which makes the translation of him by Pitt so interesting; because the translator is, for once, no traitor, but _plus royaliste que le roi_—fanatically imbued with the principles, and equipped to the finger-tips with the practice, of his original. But for the purposes of the scholar that original itself must of course be taken. The temper and the faith in which Vida writes are made manifest by the very beginning of his poem—an invocation to the Muses woven of unexceptionable _gradus_-tags, and deftly dovetailed into a dedication to the luckless Dauphin Francis, who had then taken his father’s place as Charles the Fifth’s prisoner at Madrid, and to whose captivity the poem is modestly offered as a solace or pastime. [Sidenote: _Analysis of the piece._] These invocations accomplished _more majorum_, Vida proceeds to occupy his First Book with a sort of general clearing of the ground. He is ready to teach the secret of all kinds of poetry; but the poet must very carefully inquire what are the kinds to which he himself is best adapted and best inclined. Commissioned work is dubious, unless under a king’s command. But there is more than this: the poetic child must be carefully nursed in the arts suitable to his great calling. He must be as carefully guarded from the taint of vulgar and incorrect speech; and must be regularly initiated into Poetry—Latin first, especially Virgil, and then Greek, especially Homer. A short historical sketch of poetry follows; but it, like everything else, is brought round to the deification of the Mantuan. Hence Vida (who must be pronounced rather long in weighing anchor) diverges to a good-natured intercession with parents and teachers not to have the boys whipped too much, telling a moving legend of an extremely pretty[37] boy who was actually whipped to death, or at least died of fear. Emulation, however, is quite a good stimulus; and by degrees work will be loved for itself. But original poetical production must not be attempted too young; there must be time for play; the rudiments of metre and so forth must be thoroughly learnt;