This step in advance had no immediate effect. The pages in the _Scienza nuova_ devoted to æsthetic doctrine were actually the least read of any in that marvellous book. Not that Vico exercised no influence at all; we shall see that several Italian authors both of his own time and of the generation immediately following show traces of his æsthetic ideas; but these traces are all external and material and therefore sterile. Outside Italy the _Scienza nuova_ (already announced by a compatriot in 1726 in the _Acta_ of Leipzig with the graceful comment that _magis indulget ingenio quam veritati_ and the pleasing information that _ab ipsis Italis taedio magis quam applausu excipitur_)[1] was mentioned toward the end of the century, as is well known, by Herder, Goethe, and some few others.[2] In connection with poetry, especially with the Homeric question, Vico's book was quoted by Friedrich August Wolf, to whom it had been recommended by Cesarotti[3] after the publication of the _Prolegomena ad Homerum_ (1795), but without any suspicion of the importance of its general doctrine of poetry, of which the Homeric hypothesis was a mere application. Wolf (1807) imagined himself in the presence of a talented forerunner in an isolated problem, instead of a man of intellectual stature towering above any philologist, however great. [Sidenote: _Italian writers: Conti._] Neither by reliance on the works of Vico, who founded no real school, nor, it must be added, by any independent effort along new lines, did thought succeed in maintaining or improving upon the position already attained. A notable attempt to establish a philosophical theory of poetry and the arts was made by the Venetian A. Conti, who left numerous sketches for essays on imagination, the faculties of the soul, poetic imitation and similar subjects, designed for inclusion in a large treatise on the Beautiful and Art. Conti had started by professing ideas very like those of Du Bos, affirming that the poet must "put everything in images"; that taste is as indefinable as feeling, and that there are persons without taste just as there are blind and deaf persons; he also wrote polemical tracts against the Cartesians. Later he abandoned his sensationalistic or sentimentalist theories,[4] and, inquiring into the nature of poetry, declared himself ill-satisfied with Castelvetro, Patrizzi, and even Gravina. "Had Castelvetro," he observes, "who writes so subtly of Aristotle's _Poetics,_ given two or three chapters to a philosophical explanation of the idea of imitation, he would have solved many questions raised but not clearly answered by himself concerning poetic theories. In his _Poetica_ and in his controversy against Torquato Tasso, Patrizzi never succeeded in clearly defining the philosophical idea of imitation; he collected much useful information about the history of poetry, but wilfully lost the Platonic doctrine by allowing it to mingle with the