Scaliger goes so far as to say that “it would be better never to have read” the _Symposium_ and the _Phædrus_, because of their taint with the _Grœcanicum scelus_. ----- The second book, _Qui et Hyle_, gives us an important point at once, in the fact that this _hyle_—this “material” of poetry—is [Sidenote: _Book II._: Hyle.] frankly acknowledged to be verse.[100] The entire book is occupied, at the rate of a chapter apiece, after the half-dozen general ones which open it, with almost every classical metre, if not from pyrrhic to dochmiac, at least from iambic to galliambic. A great number of interesting dicta might be extracted from this book—as, for instance, Scaliger’s remarkable distinction of Rhythm and Metre, as giving, the latter the more exact _measure_ of the line, the former its continuity and “temperament.”[101] ----- Footnote 100: The decision of this is all the more remarkable that Scaliger does not, as unwary moderns might expect, make verse the _form_ of Poetry, but the _matter_. Feet, rhythm, metre, these are the things that Poetry works in, her stuff, her raw material. The skill of the poet in its various applications is the form. A very little thought will show this to be the most decisive negation possible of the Wordsworthian heresy—anticipated by many sixteenth-century writers, from Italy to England, and though not exactly authorised, countenanced by the ancients, from Aristotle downwards—that verse is _not_ essential in any way. Footnote 101: One cannot help thinking that this distinction, which is quite contrary to those entertained by Aristotle and Quintilian, must have been influenced by the cadences of the modern languages—Italian and French—with which Scaliger was familiar. In both, but especially in French, the actual “measuring-off” of syllables was the be-all and end-all of metre, the easements provided in English and German by syllabic equivalence being in French refused altogether, in Italian replaced only by the more meagre aid of syncope and apocope. -----