Fracastoro, physician, logician, and not ungraceful poet of the graceless subject of _Syphilis_, deals with both Plato and Aristotle in his dialogue _Naugerius_, and discourses deeply on the doctrine of Imitation, the Theory of Beauty, the Aristotelian conception of the poet as more universal and philosophical than the historian, and the Platonic objection to the intervals between poetry and truth. [Sidenote: _Fracastoro._] This dialogue,[64] however (the full title is _Naugerius sive de Poetica_, its chief interlocutor being Andrea Navagero, the best follower of Catullus in Renaissance Latin[65]), tells a certain tale by its coupling with another, _Turrius sive de Intellectione_. It is wholly philosophical in intent and drift: it is perhaps the very “farthest”—comparatively early (1555) as is its date—of those Italian excursions, in the direction of making Criticism an almost wholly abstract and _a priori_ subject, which balance the unblushing “Convey—do nothing but convey,” of Vida and his followers. One of its very earliest axioms (p. 324 _ed. cit. infra_) is that “qui recte dicere de hac re velit, prius sciat necesse est, quænam poetæ natura est, quidque ipsa poetica, tum et quis philosophi genius,” &c. It must be admitted that Fracastoro is among the very ablest and most thoroughgoing explorers of these altitudes. No one has more clearly grasped, or put more forcibly, than he has that compromise between Plato and Aristotle which has been and will be mentioned so often as characteristic of the Italian thinkers in this kind. Indeed, the fifty pages of his Dialogue are almost a _locus classicus_ for the first drawing up of the creed which converted Sidney, and to which Milton, indocile to creeds as he was, gave scarcely grudging allegiance. It is full, too, of interest in deliverances on minor points—the difference between the orator and the rhetor (p. 343), the shaping of a particular kind of “orator” into a poet, his universality and his usefulness, the limits of his permitted fiction and the character of his charm. But Fracastoro is wholly in these generals: it is much if he permits himself a rare illustration from an actual poet. ----- Footnote 64: _Fracastorii Opera_, 2 vols., Lyons, 1591. The _Naugerius_ is at i. 319-365. Footnote 65: A few of these poems of Navagero will be found in Pope’s _Selecta Poemata Italorum_ (Londoni, 1740); more in the Oxford Selection (1808); most in _Carmina Quinque Illustrium Poetarum_ (Florence, 1552). ----- And always in these writers we find the old deviations, the old red herrings drawn across the scent. Fracastoro himself, reasonable as he is in many ways, falls into the foolish old fallacy that a good poet must be a good man, and the less obviously ridiculous but still mischievous demand from him of the all-accomplished acquirements once asked of the rhetorician.