In the critical handling of these editors and commentators we find, as we should expect, much of the old rhetorical trifling. [Sidenote: _Robortello_, _Segni_, _Maggi_, _Vettori_.] For all their scorn, expressed or implied, of the Middle Ages, they repeat the distinctions of _poetica_, _poesis_, _poeta_, and _poema_[59] as docilely as Martianus, or a student of Martianus, could have done a thousand or five hundred years before, and they hand it on too as a sort of charmed catchword to Scaliger[60] and Jonson.[61] But brought face to face as they are with the always weighty, though by no means always transparently clear, doctrines of Aristotle, and self-charged with the duty of explaining and commenting them, they cannot, if they would, escape the necessity of grappling with the more abstract and less merely technological questions. Robortello,[62] like Maggi, though less elaborately, has a theory of the ludicrous. Both, and others, necessarily grapple with that _crux_ of the _katharsis_ which has not yet ceased to be crucial. Both, with Segni, discuss the Unity of Time and differ about it; though none of the three has yet discovered (as indeed it is not discoverable in Aristotle or Aristotle’s literary documents) the yet more malignant Unity of Place. Vettori would extend the cramp in time (not of course with the twenty-four hours’ limit) from tragedy to epic. Most of them have arrived at that besotment as to “verisimilitude” which is responsible for the worst parts of the Neo-Classic theory, and which, in the pleasant irony common to all entanglements with Duessas of the kind, makes the unfortunate lovers guilty of the wildest excesses of artificial improbability. And in all, whether they project their reflections on their text into more general forms or not, we can see the gradual crystallising of a theory of poetry, heroic, or dramatic, or general. ----- Footnote 59: Maggi in his commentary. See Spingarn, p. 27. Footnote 60: _V. infra_, p. 71. Footnote 61: _Discoveries_, _sub fin._ (iii. 419 of Cunningham’s 3 vol. ed.) Footnote 62: On him see also note _infra_, pp. 49, 50. -----