Minturno's answer to the defenders of the _romanzi_ is more detailed and explicit than Speroni's, and it is of considerable importance because of its influence on Torquato Tasso's conception of epic poetry. Minturno does not deny--and in this his point of view is identical with Tasso's--that it is possible to employ the matter of the _romanzi_ in the composition of a perfect poem. The actions they describe are great and illustrious, their knights and ladies are noble and illustrious, too, and they contain in a most excellent manner that element of the marvellous which is so important an element in the epic action. It is the structure of the _romanzi_ with which Minturno finds fault. They lack the first essential of every form of poetry,--unity. In fact, they are little more than versified history or legend; and, while expressing admiration for the genius of Ariosto, Minturno cannot but regret that he so far yielded to the popular taste of his time as to employ the method of the _romanzi_. He approves of the suggestion of Bembo, who had tried to persuade Ariosto to write an epic instead of a romantic poem,[230] just as later, and for similar reasons, Gabriel Harvey attempted to dissuade Spenser from continuing the _Faerie Queene_. Minturno denies that the Tuscan tongue is not well adapted to the composition of heroic poetry; on the contrary, there is no form of poetry to which it is not admirably fitted. He denies that the romantic poem can be distinguished from the epic on the ground that the actions of knights-errant require a different and broader form of narrative than do those of the classical heroes. The celestial and infernal gods and demi-gods of the ancients correspond with the angels, saints, anchorites, and the one God of Christianity; the ancient sibyls, oracles, enchantresses, and divine messengers correspond with the modern necromancers, fates, magicians, and celestial angels. To the claim of the romantic poets that their poems approximate closer to that magnitude which Aristotle enjoins as necessary for all poetry, Minturno answers that magnitude is of no avail without proportion; there is no beauty in the giant whose limbs and frame are distorted. Finally, the _romanzi_ are said to be a new form of poetry unknown to Aristotle and Horace, and hence not amenable to their laws. But time, says Minturno, cannot change the truth; in every age a poem must have unity, proportion, magnitude. Everything in nature is governed by some specific law which directs its operation; and as it is in nature so it is in art, for art tries to imitate nature, and the nearer it approaches nature in her essential laws, the better it does its work. In other words, as has already been pointed out, poetry adapts itself to its times, but cannot depart from its own laws.