In the dozen years or so which elapsed between the composition and the publication of the _Defence of Poesy_, during which time it seems to have circulated in manuscript, a number of critical works appeared, and the indebtedness of several of them to Sidney's book is considerable. This is especially so of the _Apologie of Poetrie_ which Sir John Harington prefixed to his translation of the _Orlando Furioso_ in 1591. This brief treatise includes an apology for poetry in general, for the _Orlando Furioso_ in particular, and also for his own translation. The first section, which alone concerns us here, is almost entirely based on the _Defence of Poesy_. The distinguishing features of poetry are imitation, or fiction, and verse.[481] Harington disclaims all intention of discussing whether writers of fiction and dialogue in prose, such as Plato and Xenophon, are poets or not, or whether Lucan, though writing in verse, is to be regarded as an historiographer rather than as a poet;[482] so that his argument is confined to the element of imitation, or fiction. He treats poetry rather as a propaedeutic to theology and moral philosophy than as one of the fine arts. All human learning may be regarded by the orthodox Christian as vain and superfluous; but poetry is one of the most effective aids to the higher learning of God's divinity, and poets themselves are really popular philosophers and popular divines. Harington then takes up, one by one, the four specific charges of Cornelius Agrippa, that poetry is a nurse of lies, a pleaser of fools, a breeder of dangerous errors, and an enticer to wantonness; and answers them after the manner of Sidney. He differs from Sidney, however, in laying particular stress on the allegorical interpretation of imaginative literature. This element is minimized in the _Defence of Poesy_; but Harington accepts, and discusses in detail, the mediaeval conception of the three meanings of poetry, the literal, the moral, and the allegorical.[483] The death-knell of this mode of interpreting literature was sounded by Bacon, who, while not asserting that all the fables of poets are but meaningless fictions, declared without hesitation that the fable had been more often written first and the exposition devised afterward, than the moral first conceived and the fable merely framed to give expression to it.[484]