The influence of Scaliger's _Poetics_ on the French dramatic criticism of this period has generally been overestimated. Scaliger's influence in France was not inconsiderable during the sixteenth century, but it was not until the very end of the century that he held the dictatorial position afterward accorded to him. No edition of his _Poetics_ was ever published at Paris. The first edition appeared at Lyons, and subsequent editions appeared at Heidelberg and Leyden. It was in Germany, in Spain, and in England that his influence was first felt; and it was largely through the Dutch scholars, Heinsius and Vossius, that his influence was carried into France in the next century. It is a mistake to say that he had any primary influence on the formulation and acceptance of the unities of time and place in French literature; there is in his _Poetics_, as has been seen, no such definite and formal statement of the unities as may be found in Castelvetro, in Jean de la Taille, in Sir Philip Sidney, or in Chapelain. At the same time, while Scaliger's _Poetics_ did not assume during the sixteenth century the dictatorial supremacy it attained during the seventeenth, and while the particular views enunciated in its pages had no direct influence on the current of sixteenth-century ideas, it certainly had an indirect influence on the general tendency of the critical activity of the French Renaissance. This indirect influence manifests itself in the gradual Latinization of culture during the second half of the sixteenth century, and, as will be seen later, in the emphasis on the Aristotelian canons in French dramatic criticism. Scaliger was a personal friend of several members of the Pleiade, and there is every reason to believe that he wielded considerable, even if merely indirect, influence on the development of that great literary movement. The last expression of the poetic theories of the Pleiade is to be found in the didactic poem of Vauquelin de la Fresnaye, _L'Art Poetique francois, ou l'on peut remarquer la perfection et le defaut des anciennes et des modernes poesies_. This poem, though not published until 1605, was begun in 1574 at the command of Henry III., and, augmented by successive additions, was not yet complete by 1590. Vauquelin makes the following explicit acknowledgment of his indebtedness to the critical writers that preceded him:-- "Pour ce ensuivant les pas du fils de Nicomache [_i.e._ Aristotle], Du harpeur de Calabre [_i.e._ Horace], et tout ce que remache Vide et Minturne apres, j'ay cet oeuvre apreste."[331]