These ideas ran throughout the Middle Ages, and indeed persisted even beyond the Renaissance. Poetry was judged by these same criteria, but it was natural that mediaeval writers should substitute more practical reasons for the metaphysical arguments of Plato. According to the criterion of reality, it was urged that poetry in its very essence is untrue, that at bottom it is fiction, and therefore false. Thus Tertullian said that "the Author of truth hates all the false; He regards as adultery all that is unreal.... He never will approve pretended loves, and wraths, and groans, and tears;"[1] and he affirmed that in place of these pagan works there was in the Bible and the Fathers, a vast body of Christian literature and that this is "not fabulous, but true, not tricks of art, but plain realities."[2] According to the criterion of morality, it was urged that as few works of the imagination were entirely free from obscenity and blasphemy, such blemishes are inseparable from the poetic art; and accordingly, Isidore of Seville says that a Christian is forbidden to read the figments of the poets, "quia per oblectamenta inanium fabularum mentem excitant ad incentiva libidinum."[3] The third, or psychological objection, made by Plato, was similarly emphasized. Thus Tertullian pointed out that while God has enjoined us to deal calmly and gently and quietly with the Holy Spirit, literature, and especially dramatic literature, leads to spiritual agitation.[4] This point seemed to the mediaeval mind fundamental, for in real beauty, as Thomas Aquinas insisted, desire is quieted.[5] Furthermore, it was shown that the only body of literary work worthy of serious study dealt with pagan divinities and with religious practices which were in direct antagonism to Christianity. Other objections, also, were incidentally alluded to by mediaeval writers. For example, it was said, the supreme question in all matters of life is the question of conduct, and it was not apparent in what manner poetry conduces to action. Poetry has no practical use; it rather enervates men than urges them to the call of duty; and above all, there are more profitable occupations in which the righteous man may be engaged. These objections to literature are not characteristically mediaeval. They have sprung up in every period of the world's history, and especially recur in all ages in which ascetic or theological conceptions of life are dominant. They were stock questions of the Greek schools, and there are extant treatises by Maximus of Tyre and others on the problem whether or not Plato was justified in expelling Homer from his ideal commonwealth. The same objections prevailed beyond the Renaissance; and they were urged in Italy by Savonarola, in Germany by Cornelius Agrippa, in England by Gosson and Prynne, and in France by Bossuet and other ecclesiastics. II. _The Moral Justification of Poetry_