Note 592 — Chapter II · DANTE.

I have not thought it necessary to devote any space to the consideration of the relations of Scholastic Philosophy to Criticism. To search the whole literature of Scholasticism for these would be an enormous labour; and some slight knowledge of the subject (to which I once hoped to devote much of the time and energy actually, but involuntarily, spent on things less worthy and less interesting) leads me to believe that it would be an almost wholly fruitless one. In Dante and in Boccaccio (v. infra) we have interesting examples of the bent which scholastic education gave to critics. Lully, or “Lull,” as they call him now (though he by no means rhymes to “dull”), shows (v. note, p. 371) how criticism afar off might strike a schoolman. But all the men of the schools abode in mere Rhetoric, and even that they mostly despised.