[Sidenote: _Eberhard._] The _Handbuch der Æsthetik_[266] of Eberhard may deserve a line here, because, though beginning in the orthodox æsthetic manner with general Principles of Beauty, it works them down to specific Rhetoric and Poetry with rather more condescension, and a great deal more ingenuity, than usual. [Sidenote: _France: the Père André_, his Essai sur le Beau.] To pass to France, the _Essai sur le Beau_ of the Père André[267] is almost a famous book, and undoubtedly exercised a great deal of influence over the time; nor must we deny that that influence had literary effects. But even a not hasty reader might be excused—if he came across the book having never previously heard of it—for saying that its connection with Literature is almost non-existent. The very word does not occur in the Index, which is rather fuller than in most French books of the time: and though “Eloquence” and “Poetry” do, the remarks in reference to them are of the most meagre character. There must be Unity: and the poet must please the imagination (Addison had at least taught them to use the word) as well as the intellect. Even “pleasure” is to be used with jealous care as a criterion of Beauty—the love of this is to be “disinterested.” But beyond these vague, as one might have thought barren, and in the last case theoretical generalities, André has next to nothing for the student of Literary Criticism, who may make what he can of the table of the Beautiful, as— Arbitrary, Moral, National, Spiritual, Essential, Musical, Sensible, Visible. And it is well if this student has the grace to refrain from amplifying this table after the pattern and in the spirit of the twenty-eighth chapter of the Third Book of Rabelais. [Sidenote: _Italy: Vico._] In Italy, the illustrious author[268] of the _Scienza Nuova_[269] had, before Baumgarten, before even Breitinger, and long before André, turned the powers of his profound and original thought to the question of _sapienza poetica_. He lays at least as much stress as Baumgarten himself upon the _sensitiva_: discerns natural and diametrical opposition between Metaphysics and Poetry; but still admits a Science, “new” in this as in other respects, of Poetry, or at least a _logica poetica_ which compares curiously with Breitinger’s “Logic of Imagination” and other things. There does not appear to be any suspicion or any likelihood of indebtedness: it is only one of the innumerable instances of things being “in the air” and of the birds of the air carrying them to different places and persons. With him, poetry, like everything else, is an item or factor in human _history_, though, following his strong metaphysical turn, he deals largely with the relations to soul and sense, &c. [Sidenote: _His literary places._]