The third, _Qui et Idea_, is far longer than either of the preceding, and is less easily describable to modern readers. [Sidenote: _Books III. and IV._: Idea _and_ Parasceve.] Those who have read the first volume of this book with some care will understand it without much difficulty, if we call it a throwing of the traditional and technical treatment of Rhetoric into a form suitable to Poetry. Prosopopœia and ethopœia; the bearings or “colours” of time, place, race, sex, and the rest; the considerations of chance and manners and fortune; lead us to our old friends the Figures. To these, giving them the most liberal interpretation possible, so as to include fresh kinds of poetry as well as actual turns of speech, Scaliger complacently allows nearly a hundred out of the nearly hundred and thirty chapters of this overgrown Book, comprising by itself nearly a full quarter of the volume. Nor does even this devotion to Figures satisfy him, for the Fourth Book, _Qui et Parasceve_ (preparation), beginning with the characters or distinctions of style, turns before long to more Figures, and is, in fact, a sort of Part II. of the Third. Naturally, there is no part of the book more difficult to analyse, but, as naturally, there is none in which analysis is less required. Scaliger luxuriates in his opportunities of sub-division and sub-definition; but he abounds ever more and more in those examples which we have recognised as, from the time of Hermogenes downwards, the “solace of this sin,” and the plentifulness of which in Scaliger himself would, even if they stood alone, go some way to atone for the absence of a larger examination of writers as wholes. And he does not allow us to lack even this.