_Logic_, _Rhetoric_, _Arithmetic_, _Geometry_, _Music_, and _Astronomy_—were contrasted with the “servile” or “mechanical” arts—that is, handicrafts involving manual labour. And thus, though _art_ in this wide sense is old, _artist_ first occurs in Sir Philip Sidney’s _Apologie for Poetry_. _Artisan_ appeared at about the same time, and was not then, as now, confined to mechanical and manual labourers. O, what a world of profit and delight wrote the poet, Marlowe, Is promis’d to the studious artisan. In the light of two or three familiar words let us try and trace the development, from Sidney’s time onwards, of some of our modern notions of “art”, and in particular of poetry. Criticism—the branch of literature or journalism with which our daily and weekly reviews make us so familiar—does not date very far back into the past. Its parents were the medieval arts of grammar and philology, which, among the commentators on classical texts, had already sometimes blossomed into the rudiments of aesthetic. The actual words _critic_ and _critical_, however, have been traced no farther back than Shakespeare; _critic_ in its aesthetic sense is first found in Bacon; and _criticism_ and _criticize_ are neither of them earlier than the seventeenth century. Based for the most part on Aristotle’s _Poetics_, serious criticism began to take shape in England at the Renaissance. From Elizabethan critical essays, such as Sidney’s _Apologie for Poetry_, we can get an idea of the light in which poetry and the other arts had begun to be viewed at that time. To Sidney, for example, the distinguishing mark of poetry was, not metre, but a certain “feigning.” The first philosophers and historians, he affirmed, were also poets, not indeed because of what we should magnificently call their “creative imagination”, but simply because they “invented” certain fictitious persons and events. We should not now regard this as a virtue in an historian. Sidney, however, points out the derivation of _poetry_ from the Greek ‘poiein’, ‘to make’,[69] and shows how this distinguishes it from all the other arts and sciences, which in the last analysis merely “follow Nature”, while only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the Zodiac of his own wit.