Note 280 — Chapter V · ELIZABETHAN CRITICISM. (continued 2)

Yet in re-reading Jonson, just after a pretty elaborate overhauling of the Italians, I find very little certain indebtedness of detail. Mr Spingarn seems to me to go too far in tracing, p. 88, “small Latin and less Greek” to Minturno’s “small Latin and very small Greek,” and the distinction of poeta, poema, poesis to Scaliger or Maggi. Fifty people might have independently thought of the first; and the second is an application of a “common form” nearly as old as rhetoric.