Note 77 — Chapter II · EARLY ITALIAN CRITICS.

Robortello edited Ælian and Æschylus as well as Longinus and Aristotle; Petrus Victorius was busied very widely with the classics. The combined treatment of Aristotle and Horace by the former in his Explicationes (Basle, 1555) is distinctly noteworthy. His dealings with the Greek are almost pure commentary; those with the Roman, though called a “Paraphrase,” are much freer. He begins with a sort of expository lecture on the Epistola ad Pisones, introducing most of its matter and much illustration from other authors. Then separate short essays follow on Satire, Epigram, Comedy, Sales, and Elegy. The heading “Sales” is especially worthy of attention as illustrating that tormenting preoccupation of the classics on Wit, which transmitted itself to the Renaissance, and is found in moderns as recent as Whately. Robortello exercised much authority, and is shown by M. Morel-Fatio in his recent edition of Lope de Vega’s Arte Nuevo (v. infra, p. 343) to have furnished the Spanish poet with much, if not most, of the miscellaneous erudition which he displays to no great purpose. Robortello’s earlier editio princeps of Longinus (ibid., 1554) is noteworthy in a different way. He was by no means more modest than the average Renaissance scholar; on the contrary, he is accused of special arrogance. But this opus redivivum, antea ignotum, e tenebris in lucem editum, as he calls it, seems to have puzzled, if not actually abashed, him. He has no introduction, no regular commentary: only side-headings of the matter, from which, he says, “all the method of the book, and the order of the questions treated, and the whole rationale of the teaching,” and much else, can be learnt. The spirit was too potent for him who had called it up. Of other mainly classical commentators, Riccoboni (Compendium Artis Poeticæ, 1591) is again useful, because he combines Horace and Aristotle, and practicalises the combination, identifying the Aristotelian or pseudo-Aristotelian (see vol. i. p. 34) “Episode” with the first Four Acts, the Exodus with the Fifth, &c. Maggi, Segni, Zabarella are even farther from our sphere.