trials or defend private ones that come up for judgment."[25] According to these views, the tragical catharsis was regarded as designed in general to demonstrate the instability of fortune, or to terrify by example, or to proclaim the triumph of justice, or to render the spectators insensible to the strokes of fortune, owing to their familiarity with suffering. The pedagogic theory, thus renewed and sustained by the authority of the ancients, was popularized in France, Spain, England and Germany, together with all the Italian poetic doctrines of the Renaissance. The French writers of the period of Louis XIV. are altogether penetrated with it. "_Cette science agréable qui mêle la gravité des préceptes avec la douceur du langage_," is what La Ménardière calls poetry (1640), in the same way as Le Bossu (1675), for whom "_le premier but du poète est d'instruire_,"[26] as Homer taught, when he wrote two interesting didactic manuals relating to military and political events: the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey._ [Sidenote: _The "Poetics of the Renaissance."_] This pedagogic theory has therefore been reasonably described by all the modern critics in concert, as if by antonomasia, as the _Poetics of the Renaissance._ It must, however, always be understood that it did not appear for the first time in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, but that it was prevalent and generally accepted at that time. It may even be remarked, as has already been acutely done,[27] that the Renaissance naturally did not distinguish the didactic kind of poetry from the other kinds, since for it every kind of poetry was didactic. But the Renaissance was not a real Renaissance, save when and where it continued the interrupted spiritual work of antiquity, and in this sense it would perhaps be more just to describe as its Poetics, or rather, as the important element in its Poetics, not the repetition of the pedagogic theory of antiquity and of the Middle Ages, but the resumption, which also took place, of the discussions upon the possible, the probable (_verisimile_, εικός) of Aristotle, on the reasons of Plato's condemnation and on the procedure of the artist who creates by imagining. [Sidenote: _Dispute concerning the universal and the probable in art._]