Scaliger was very much better qualified than Boileau to be _législateur du Parnasse_ in the sense in which both understood Parnassus: or perhaps it would be better to say that without a Scaliger a Boileau would have been impossible. [Sidenote: _The_ Poetic.] He had immense learning; he had absolute confidence in his own judgment; and within limits which, if they reduce his positive value, make him an even more complete and direct exponent of his own particular school and creed, he had great acuteness, an orderly and logical spirit, and a thorough command of method. Nothing (certain inevitable postulates being granted) can be more luminous and intelligible than the book, in which the author, through all his thousand pages, never loses sight, nor permits his reader to lose sight, of the subject, the process, and the goal. That he stands forth in the preface to his son Sylvius with an air of patronage at once paternal and pedagogic, announcing himself as the pioneer of the subject, dismissing those who allege Varro, as with levity ignoring the fact that neither Varro nor anybody else in antiquity did, or could do, anything of the kind: that he blandly sweeps away the _plebs grammaticorum_; that he labels the _Ars Poetica_ itself as teaching _adeo sine ulla arte ut saturæ propius esse videatur_, Aristotle as fragmentary, Vida as _optimus poeta in theatro, claudus magister in schola_—is all of it agreeably Scaligerian in manner. But it is far from being untrue in fact. And there is a touch of sublimity in the _Quare porro opera danda est nobis_, “wherefore _we_ must put our shoulders to the wheel,” with which he concludes. “Let others grub money, or canvass for office, or talk about the wars as parasite guests at dinner: we will let them alone, and simply defend the nobility of our studies, the magnanimity and simplicity of our purpose.” After this magnificent pose and draping, and before commendatory verses (the main copy being by no less a person than Etienne de La Boétie) comes a table of contents of antique clearness and solidity, filling nearly a dozen pages, by means of which, and of the more than sixty of index at the end, the study of the text is not a little facilitated.