To conclude, then, it would seem that by the middle of the sixteenth century there had grown up in Italy an almost complete body of poetic rules and theories. This critical system passed into France, England, Spain, Germany, Portugal, and Holland; so that by the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a common body of Renaissance doctrine throughout western Europe. Each country, however, gave this system a national cast of its own; but the form which it received in France ultimately triumphed, and modern classicism therefore represents the supremacy of the French phase, or version, of Renaissance Aristotelianism. A number of modern writers, among them Lessing and Shelley, have returned more or less to the original Italian form. This is represented, in Elizabethan criticism, by Sidney; Ben Jonson represents a transitional phase, and Dryden and Pope the final form of French classicism. FOOT-NOTES: [536] Morley, _English Writers_, ix. 187. [537] Haslewood, ii. 197. [538] _Ibid._ ii. 217. [539] Jonson, _Works_, iii. 470. _Cf._ Gascoigne's comments on _enjambement_, in Haslewood, ii. 11. [540] Haslewood, ii. 205. [541] _Scholemaster_, p. 73. [542] _Ibid._ p. 145 _sq._ [543] _Cf._ Haslewood, ii. p. xxii. The treatises of Gascoigne (1575) and King James VI. (1584) contain no reference to quantitative verse. [544] _Cf._ Pulci, _Morgante Maggiore_, xxv. 117. [545] Haslewood, ii. 280. [546] Haslewood, ii. 5. [547] R. Ellis, _Poems and Fragments of Catullus translated in the original metres_, London, 1871, p. xiv. _sq._ [548] Stanyhurst, p. 11 _sq._ [549] Haslewood, ii. 69. [550] Puttenham, p. 126 _sq._ [551] _Defence_, p. 55. [552] Haslewood, ii. 167. [553] Haslewood, ii. 186. [554] _Cf._ Ellis, _op. cit._, p. xvi. [555] _Scholemaster_, p. 93. [556] _Ibid._ pp. 118, 121. [557] _Defence_, p. 46. [558] Haslewood, ii. 19, 85 _sq._ [559] _Works_, vi. 202. [560] _Discoveries_, p. 78. [561] _Cf._ Scaliger, _Poet._ v. 3, where the highest virtue of a poet is said to be _electio et sui fastidium_; and vi. 4, where it is said that the "life of all excellence lies in measure." [562] _Works_, ii. 3; _cf._ _Discoveries_, pp. 22-27. [563] _Works_, iii. 297. [564] _Discoveries_, p. 7. [565] _Scholemaster_, p. 139. [566] _Defence_, p. 48. [567] _Works_, iii. 321; _cf._ i. 335, iii. 487. [568] _Discoveries_, p. 66. [569] _Ibid._ p. 78 _sq._ [570] _Works_, iii. 473. [571] The chapter on poetry in Peacham's _Compleat Gentleman_ (1622) is interesting chiefly because of its indebtedness to Scaliger, who is called by Peacham (p. 91) "the prince of all learning and the judge of judgments, the divine Julius Caesar Scaliger." This constitutes him a literary arbiter if not dictator. In the _Great Assises holden in Parnassus_ (1645), Scaliger is proclaimed one of the lords of Parnassus, in company with Bacon, Sidney, Erasmus, Budaeus, Heinsius, Vossius, Casaubon, Mascardo, Pico della Mirandola, Selden, Grotius, and others.