It is about the middle of the sixteenth century, then, that the influence of Italian criticism is first visible. The literature of Italy was read with avidity in France. Many educated young Frenchmen travelled in Italy, and several Italian men of letters visited France. Girolamo Muzio travelled in France in 1524, and again in 1530 with Giulio Camillo.[312] Aretino mentions the fact that a Vincenzo Maggi was at the Court of France in 1548, but it has been doubted whether this was the author of the commentary on the _Poetics_.[313] In 1549, after the completion of the two last parts of his _Poetica_, dedicated to the Bishop of Arras, Trissino made a tour about France.[314] Nor must we forget the number of Italian scholars called to Paris by Francis I.[315] The literary relations between the two countries do not concern us here; but it is no insignificant fact that the great literary reforms of the Pleiade should take place between 1548 and 1550, the very time when critical activity first received its great impetus in Italy. This Italian influence is just becoming apparent in Sibilet, for whom the poets between Jean le Maire de Belges and Clement Marot are the chief models, but who is not wholly averse to the moderate innovations derived by France from classical antiquity and the Italian Renaissance. M. Brunetiere, in a very suggestive chapter of his History of French Criticism, regards the _Defense_ of Du Bellay, the _Poetics_ of Scaliger, and the _Art Poetique_ of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye as the most important critical works in France during the sixteenth century.[316] It may indeed be said that Du Bellay's _Defense_ (1549) is not in any true sense a work of literary criticism at all; that Scaliger's _Poetics_ (1561) is the work, not of a French critic, but of an Italian humanist; and that Vauquelin's _Art Poetique_ (not published until 1605), so far as any influence it may have had is concerned, does not belong to the sixteenth century, and can hardly be called important. At the same time these three works are interesting documents in the literary history of France, and represent three distinct stages in the development of French criticism in the sixteenth century. Du Bellay's work marks the beginning of the introduction of classical ideals into French literature; Scaliger's work, while written by an Italian and in Latin, was composed and published in France, and marks the introduction of the Aristotelian canons into French criticism; and Vauquelin's work indicates the sum of critical ideas which France had gathered and accepted in the sixteenth century.