The contents of the treatise or treatises, especially if we take them with Trissino’s attempts to introduce the Greek Omega and the Greek Epsilon into Italian spelling, his grammatical “Doubts,” and his later “Introduction to Grammar,” his dialogue _Il Castellano_, and so forth,[51] will show his standpoint with sufficient clearness. [Sidenote: _His critical value._] It is almost purely formal in the minor, not to say the minim, kinds of form. He is indeed credited by some with a position of importance, in the history of the Unities. He is, they say, the first to refer to the observance of the Unity of Time as a distinction from “ignorant poets,”[52] giving therewith a disparaging glance at mediæval drama.[53] But this overlooks the fact that he is simply repeating what Aristotle says, with an addition much more likely[54] to refer to non-Humanist contemporaries than to the almost forgotten “mystery.” His theory of the Heroic Poem, like his practice in the _Italia Liberata_, is slavishly Aristotelian. The chief evidence of real development that I can find is in his treatment of Comedy, where the extremely rapid and contemptuous dismissal of the Master called imperatively for some supplement, considering the popularity of the kind in the writer’s own time and country. Possibly reinforcing Aristotle here with Cicero, and certainly using the famous _Suave mari magno_ of Lucretius, he succeeds in putting together a theory of the ludicrous to which, or to some subsequent developments of it in Italy, Hobbes’s “passion of sudden glory” has been[55] not unjustly traced. The “sudden” seems indeed to be directly due to Maggi, a critic who will be presently mentioned with other commentators on the _Poetics_. And Maggi had published long before Trissino’s later Divisions appeared, though, it may be, not before they were written.[56] ----- Footnote 51: All these, with the _Poetica_ and the translation of Dante, will be found in the second volume of the edition cited. I take the opportunity of correcting an injustice to Trissino which I committed at i. 417, and which was brought to my notice by a reviewer in the _Athenæum_. “Giovan- [or Giam-] battista Doria” _does_ say, in his dedication to the Cardinal de' Medici, that Dante wrote it in Latin, adding, however, a clause of such singular obscurity that at first sight one takes it as meaning that Dante _himself_ translated the book into Italian. For discussion of this see Rajna’s ed. of the _De V. E._, p. li _sq._ Footnote 52: II. 95. Perhaps better “unlearned,” _indotti Poeti_. Footnote 53: Spingarn, p. 92. Footnote 54: _Et ancor oggi si fa._ -----