When it is examined in detail the proceeding may excite even more astonishment, which will be wisely directed not more to [Sidenote: _Historical and symptomatic significance._] the original conception of it than to the extent to which, from what followed, it seems to have hit certain peculiarities in the æsthetic sense of mankind as regards poetry. We may easily go wrong by devoting too much attention to the fact of Vida’s individual selection of the poet to whom all other poets are bound _jurare in verba_. It is certain that, from his own day to this, Virgil has appealed to many tastes—and to some of the greatest—secure of his result of being pronounced _altissimo poeta_. Those who like him least cannot but admit that Dante and Tennyson among poets, that Quintilian and Scaliger—nay, that even Boileau—among critics, are not precisely negligible quantities. But the real subject—not merely of astonishment but of reasonable and deliberate determination to adopt a position of “No Surrender” in the denial of Vida’s position—is this selection of _any_ poet, no matter who it may be, as not only a positive pattern of all poetic excellence, but a negative _index expurgatorius_ of all poetic delinquency. Not Homer, not Dante, not Shakespeare himself, can be allowed the first position; and the main principle and axiom of all sound Criticism is, that not merely no actual poet, but no possible one, can be allowed the second. This kind of poetical predestination—this fixing of a hard-and-fast type, within which lies all salvation and without which lies none—is utter blasphemy against the poetical spirit. Not only will simple imitation of the means whereby one poet has achieved poetry not suffice to enable another to achieve it, but this suggestion is by far the least dangerous part of the doctrine. It will probably lead to the composition of much bad poetry, but it will not necessarily cause the abortion, or the mistaking when born, of any that is good. The damnatory clauses of the creed must have, and did have, this fatal effect.