Moreover, great as are the volume and the intensity of Italian attention to criticism in the years between 1535 and 1560, the Devil’s Advocate may, without mere cavilling, cast disparagement upon most of its expressions. The dealings of the scholars with the subject are no doubt to a certain extent accidental or obligatory; they might have bestowed, and in fact actually did bestow,[77] at least equal pains on texts not directly, or not at all, concerning criticism. The work of Tolomei is merely an example of those Puckish tricks which something sometimes plays on the human intellect; that of Muzio a dilettante exercise mainly. The treatises of the others from Daniello to Varchi hover between abstract discussion, which sometimes approaches twaddle, dilettante trifling which makes the same approach on another side, and an estimable, but for literature at large comparatively unimportant, guerilla about the virtues and qualities, the vices and defects, of the Italian language—a language which had already seen its very best days, and was settling down to days very far from its best. The three authors to whom we shall now come, and who will occupy us to the end of this chapter, escape, in one way or another, the brunt of all these grudgements. Minturno supplies us with the most wide-ranging and systematic handlings of poetry in its general, and of “regular” and “vulgar” poetry in their particular, aspects that had yet been produced, Giraldi Cinthio with some of the most original critical essays, Lilius Giraldus with a survey of the poetical, and to some extent the literary, state of Europe in his time, for the like of which we may look in vain before and not too successfully since. ----- Footnote 77: