Mr Spingarn (p. 94) apparently states that he “formulated” them, but the gist of the next two pages fully corrects this slip or ambiguity; and he has himself pointed out with equal decision and correctness that the French assumption contained in the phrase, _Unités Scaligériennes_, is unfounded. Footnote 106: P. 365. ----- We may venture indeed to suspect that Scaliger “had more wit than to be here.” One may frequently differ with him; but he seldom runs mad on mere theory. It is he, for instance, who, while, as we have seen, he lays down uncompromisingly that the material of poetry is verse, instances the _Æthiopica_ as a perfect epic. Instead of confusing poetry and learning, as some have done, he holds the much more sensible position that learning is useful to a poet. He takes the hard-and-fast ethical view of the ends both of tragedy and of all poetry, and he believes firmly in the type. But he does not bemuse himself, as some had done and more were to do, in the explanation of _katharsis_, and the definition of the tragic hero. His greatest and also his most pervading critical fault is that “deification of Virgil,” whereof, though by no means the inventor, he was the chief prophet to the best part of three centuries. [Sidenote: _His Virgil-worship._] Let it be admitted (with every possible emphasis on the fact that it is no mere extorted admission but a genuine and spontaneous opinion) that anybody is free to admire Virgil or any one else as much as he likes. “She that is fair to him” _is_ so, and there’s an end on’t. But if any one proceed, not merely to intimate indifference to other fair ones, but to find positive fault with them because they are not like her, then he becomes at once uncritical: still more so if he erect her qualities, features, style, into abstract virtues and positive truths, all opposites to which are sin and vileness. He may call “Simula Silene, nervosa et lignea Dorcas,” to take two only out of the famous list in the classic place of this matter. But he must not declare that a girl who has a straight Grecian nose is therefore ugly, or that softness and plumpness are not excellent things in woman. Scaliger does this. For him Virgil is, at once, the standard of excellence and the infallible touchstone of defect. Nay, he is actually a better Nature; a wiser but more perfect Creation, whereby you may save yourself the trouble of outside imitation, inasmuch as everything worth imitating is there better done than by Nature herself. It is impossible to exaggerate or caricature Scaliger’s Maronolatry: as the Highfliers did in the case of Defoe’s _Shortest Way_, he would cheerfully accept and indorse the most outrageous statement of it.