"Is it said that we have no infallible art by which to adjust our precepts? But who can doubt it? We have art, we have precepts and rules which bind us, and the principal precept is to imitate nature, for the works of poets express the nature, the manners, and the genius of the age in which they write.... Lope de Vega writes in conformity with art, because he follows nature. If, on the contrary, the Spanish drama adjusted itself to the rules and laws of the ancients, it would proceed against the requirements of nature, and against the foundations of poetry.... The great Lope has done things over and above the laws of the ancients, but never against these laws." Another Spanish writer defines art as "an attentive observation of examples graded by experience, and reduced to method and the majesty of laws."[421] It was this naturalistic conception of the poetic art, and especially of the drama, that obtained in France during the first thirty years of the seventeenth century. The French playwrights imitated the Spanish drama in practice, and from the Spanish theorists seemed to have derived the critical justification of their plays. Hardy himself, like Lope de Vega, argues that "everything which is approved by usage and the public taste is legitimate and more than legitimate." Another writer of this time, Francois Ogier, in the preface of the second edition of Jean de Schelandre's remarkable drama of _Tyr et Sidon_ (1628), argues for intellectual independence of the ancients much in the same way as Giraldi Cintio, Pigna, and the other partisans of the _romanzi_ had done three-quarters of a century before. The taste of every nation, he says, is quite different from any other. "The Greeks wrote for the Greeks, and in the judgment of the best men of their time they succeeded. But we should imitate them very much better by giving heed to the tastes of our own country, and the genius of our own language, than by forcing ourselves to follow step by step both their intention and their expression." This would seem to be at bottom Goethe's famous statement that we can best imitate the Greeks by trying to be as great men as they were. It is interesting to note, in all of these early critics, traces of that historical criticism which is usually regarded as the discovery of our own century. But after all, the French like the Spanish playwrights were merely beginning to practise what the Italian dramatists in their prefaces, and some of the Italian critics in their treatises, had been preaching for nearly a century.