For in this great space, occupied with equal method and erudition, it could not be but that remarkable pronouncements on the more general questions of literary criticism, whether given _obiter_ or in definite reference to argued questions, should emerge. [Sidenote: _General ideas on Unity and the like._] Scaliger is, indeed, less set than most of his predecessors in Italian criticism, and than some at least of his successors, on these general pronouncements. “The disinterested and philosophic treatment of æsthetic problems wholly aside from all practical considerations,” as the tendency of Italian criticism has been rather unguardedly characterised,[104] does not seem to have had the first attraction for him. Yet he could not, in the wide sweep of his net, have avoided such questions if he would; and, with his fearless temper and eager literary interests, there is no reason to suppose that he would have avoided them if he could. He did not explicitly enjoin the Three Unities,[105] but he did more than any other man had done to inculcate that unfortunate notion of “verisimilitude”[106] from which, much more than from Aristotle, they were deduced. Not many words need be wasted (especially as the point will recur only too often during the volume) on the absurdity of this wresting of _Incredulus odi_. The whole arrangements of the theatre are _invraisemblables_, no matter whether you have electric light or cross-shaped laths with candles on them, marquises sitting on the stage or millionaires in stage-boxes, elaborate scenery or directions to the audience, “Here is Thebes.” You do not murder, or (if you can help it) make love, in real life, before a miscellaneous audience who have paid to see you do it; in real life you do not talk in any regular stage lingo that has hitherto been invented, whether the outward form of it be senarii, or fourteeners, or complicated rhymed stanzas, or doggerel, or couplet, or blank verse, or stage prose. The sixteenth century _Globe_, and the twentieth century _Lyceum_, are alike unlike any place in which one habitually performs any action of life from birth, through marriage, to death. That there _is_ a stage verisimilitude, which it is dangerous or fatal to break, need not be denied. But neither Scaliger nor any of his successors in purism has proved that we are, or ought to be, any more shocked by Æschylus when he shifts from Delphi to Athens than by Thackeray when he transports us from Flanders to Chelsea. ----- Footnote 104: Spingarn, p. 172. “Disinterested treatment” of practical problems, such as poems certainly are, “wholly aside from all practical considerations,” sometimes leads to awkward results. Footnote 105: