PART 1
27 January 1974
In the early hours of the morning, 18-year-old Gudmundur Einarsson stumbled out of the one nightclub in Hafnarfjordur into a taut, flinty gale that drove fat snowflakes onto his long, wavy, dark hair. The weather was so bad even the town’s taxi drivers had decided to call it a night, convinced they wouldn’t get very far on the roads.
The club wasn’t much to talk about – ‘a crummy hillbilly place’ was the glowing description from one regular – but nightlife was in short supply in Iceland. Party goers would drive long distances, sometimes hundreds of kilometres from Reykjavik, to a dance in the countryside, just to have a different experience.
The night had started out well for Gudmundur. First it was a party in the Reykjavik suburbs with his friend Gretar Haraldsson, who had known Gudmundur since they were seven years old. He remembered, ‘He liked to fish, play football; he liked the Beatles and he liked to go bowling.’ Gudmundur also liked mischief, stealing copper with his friends to melt it down, using the money to buy booze. Gudmundur and his friends would head into Reykjavik to watch bands or try and pick up girls at one of the nightclubs. When they were in town, Gretar said his friend would never be pushed around: ‘He was a good fighter, he was strong, he would stand up for himself.’
On this night, Gudmundur was going further afield to Hafnarfjordur, a fishing town six miles outside of Reykjavik. The club was on the main street, across from the harbour, where the hulking fishing boats prepared to venture out into the turbulent Atlantic to harvest the cod and haddock that were the lifeblood of the town.
Gudmundur had a bottle of brandy to get through with his friends before hitting the club’s sweaty mosh pit, filled with other drunken
teenagers. One of the barmaids, Kristrun Steindorsdottir, had noticed how Gudmundur stood out. In his drunken haze, Gudmundur had been separated from his buddies, who were off chasing girls, but it didn’t matter, he picked up another companion. The barmaid remembered later how Gudmundur’s tall frame had to be supported by a shorter, older friend.
When the club closed, Gudmundur faced a three hour walk back to his home in Blesugrof, on the outskirts of Reykjavik. The safest way was along the long and winding Reykjavikvegur, while the more perilous route was across the lava fields of the Reykjanes peninsula. Only a crazy person or a young drunk one would dare to think of this. In the daytime you could spot the potential dangers in this sullen, blasted landscape of charcoal, grey and brown, but the snow had turned the lava fields into a soft cotton-wool pixie land, a place of beauty but also menace. Lurking beneath the snow were gaping fissures, big enough to swallow a man whole. Gudmundur and his companion thought they would chance their luck and thumb a lift home to escape the gnawing, raw wind that bit into their chafed hands.
Elinborg Rafnsdottir was driving through Hafnarfjordur with her friend Sigridur when she spotted Gudmundur. Sigridur had a crush on the boy with deep set eyes and long dark hair, so Elinborg slowed down to offer him a lift. As she stopped, Gudmundur’s companion threw himself onto the bonnet of her car. ‘We got scared when we saw how drunk he was,’ Elinborg later recalled, and so they decided to let the drunken boys find another way home. She drove on, leaving Gudmundur with his angry friend.
Several hours later, Gudmundur was seen again, this time alone, walking out of Hafnarfjordur on the main road to Reykjavik. He wasn’t very steady on his feet and almost fell in front of a car, but once the driver saw he hadn’t hurt the swaying young man, he left him on the road, dismissing him as another foolish drunk. As the snow fell thick and fast, turning the brightly painted roofs a soft white, silence fell on the town.
By Monday morning, Gudmundur hadn’t returned home from his weekend revelry. His friends assumed he had hooked up with a girl
but his father, Einar, knew something was wrong, so he reported his son missing. The case was assigned to Njordur Snaeholm, a veteran detective, and on 29 January the police and rescue organisation, the Life Saving Association mobilised an extensive search for the young man. His friends gathered at his family’s house, one of a group on a stretch by the river, and Gudmundur’s brother, Baldur organised 200 people into teams to scour the lava fields around Hafnarfjordur, while overhead a coast guard helicopter looked for any trace. Gudmundur’s disappearance had become front-page news in the island’s main newspaper, Morgunbladid.
Iceland’s treacherous winter was doing the search teams no favours: 60cm of snow had fallen in the area in a few days and Arctic gusts had blown it into drifts, so in some places volunteers had to wade waist deep through the snow. The police thought Gudmundur may have tried to make it to a friend’s house, so they asked for the teams to search in sheds and outhouses where he might have taken shelter. There were appeals for people to keep an eye out for the handsome teenager in a polka dot jacket, green pants and brown shoes.
For several days, his parents and three brothers waited anxiously for any news, but less than a week after he went missing, on 3 February, the search was wound down. His disappearance drew a phlegmatic response from Icelanders. In this volcanic, muscular land, people disappear all the time. Some are consumed by the dark, thrashing waves of the Atlantic while others perish falling from cliffs or, like Gudmundur, it was thought, are hidden somewhere deep in the lava.
There were no tearful, emotional appeals from his dad Einar or brother Baldur, indeed there was no public comment from his family at all. They were left to grieve in peace. It wasn’t the practice of Icelandic journalists to intrude upon families who had suffered such a tragedy.
Gudmundur’s body was never found; the most likely assumption was that he had been swallowed beneath the lava, forever in the long shadows, where the Huldufolk dwell, the mythical hidden elves of Icelandic folklore.
Erla Bolladottir would never forget the events of that long January night. She had reluctantly agreed to go into Reykjavik with her friend Hulda, to the throbbing excess of Klubburin, Iceland’s prime nightspot. She had been spending a lot of time by herself lately and feeling very depressed, and hadn’t felt up to socialising. Plus it wasn’t really Erla’s scene – way too straight, more disco than the hippy vibe she liked. At least there were three floors in the club, so when the pulsing beats became too much she could head up the spiral staircase to the banging rock floor at the top. There wasn’t much choice; there were only a handful of nightclubs to cater for the young who were increasingly keen to kick back against the Lutheran shackles of their parents’ generation. Erla drank a little but wasn’t in the mood to party and succumb to the sweet, mellow aroma of hash wafting through the club. By the time she left, she had missed the last bus but managed to hitch a lift back to her apartment in Hafnarfjordur with some boys she knew.
As she walked up to her apartment at number 11 Hamarsbraut, Erla was enveloped by the thick, dark folds of night. It was still hours before the thinning of the darkness, signalling morning during this beginning of winter. The tiny apartment was pitch black. As her boyfriend, Saevar, had the only key Erla had to get in by crawling through the basement window of the laundry room. Exhausted she crashed out in bed.
Later she woke, hearing something outside her window. It took her a moment to figure out that it was men’s voices, whispering in low, hushed tones. They sounded menacing and conspiratorial and Erla was alone in the apartment. Saevar was nowhere to be seen.
As she listened, not daring to breathe, she could hear that the men were checking whether she was awake or asleep. The apartment was so small that if these men could have reached in through the window they could almost touch Erla who was frozen with fear on her bed. She heard the group walk around to the front of the apartment, their footsteps cushioned by the generous carpet of snow that covered the town. The men seemed intent on getting inside, but why did they want to come into her home in the dead of night, when she was alone and vulnerable?
She recognised their voices, they were friends of Saevar’s: Kristjan, Tryggvi and Albert. Saevar had warned her that he didn’t want Erla ever to be alone with them. Albert was laid back and harmless but Tryggvi and Kristjan could turn nasty when they were drunk. They were part of the petty crime scene in Reykjavik, making money from doing whatever manual jobs they could, so that they could buy booze or hash. They had appeared at the apartment a week before. Erla remembered, ‘I was watching TheLateLateShow and I turned and saw the three of them standing in the hall and I thought, “Why are they inside?”’ Saevar had been annoyed; he didn’t want them there, as, Erla said, ‘If they got drunk they could make trouble.’
Here they were, back again and she knew that she didn’t want them in her home.
Then she woke up, hot and confused, her hair slick with sweat. It was still dark and she sat up to listen to see if the men were still outside. There was no sound, just the numbing silence of winter. She realised it must have been a dream, purging her troubled thoughts of the day.
She felt marooned in Hafnarfjordur, hemmed in by the lava fields of the Reykjanes peninsula. She could guess where Saevar was, probably with another woman. He had cheated on her in the past and she was sure he was up to it again.
Last winter had been a rough time for her. Her Dad, Bolli, had suffered a stroke and was in rehabilitation in hospital. Much of the time she was alone in her little apartment. During the day she worked at the Icelandic Post and Telephone company and she would return home for interminable evenings with coal black star-filled skies.
She looked at the packet of Viceroy cigarettes next to her bed. She only had to reach across and light a cigarette and, as the smoke filled her lungs, it would calm her down. But she couldn’t rouse herself, she thought, ‘What difference does it make whether I smoke a cigarette or not?’ A cigarette couldn’t alter her miserable life. She would have to move though as she needed the toilet. It was hardly far, but she just didn’t have the energy to do it. She could feel her
bowels loosening, she knew she had to leave the bed but she had no will for this most basic human task. The bed would become her toilet. How had she ended up living like this, in a tiny flat with Saevar, her boyfriend who cheated on her, was never here and yet tried to control her life?
As the Douglas DC-8 banked, climbing through the clouds, away from Keflavik airport out across the swirling grey Atlantic, Erla sat back in her seat, excited. She was on a Loftleider flight, Iceland’s self-proclaimed ‘hippy airline’, cheap, cheerful and taking her away from the, murky, bleak Icelandic winter for the crisp, winter skies of New York state. For the 18-year-old Erla, America offered freedom; a chance to escape from the conservative constraints of Iceland and enjoy the freewheeling counter-culture vibe.
It was December 1973, and Erla would have almost a month away in the country where she had spent the first seven years of her life. There was just one problem and he was sitting in the seat next to her: Saevar Cieselski. Erla was not a fan of the slight, cocky young man with his straight black hair and the dark complexion that made him stand out among the Icelandic Celts. She said later, ‘He always had an air about him that he knew everything.’ She had seen him around town when he would flash his winning smile. He had boasted that he knew about Erla and her family; so much so that she wondered if he was stalking her. The answer was far more straightforward. With a population then of just over 200,000, there are often only a few degrees of separation between people in Iceland. That was the case with Erla and Saevar, who had first met many years before.
Erla’s brother Arthur had spent summers working at a farm owned by Saevar’s grandparents. Arthur shared a room with the young Saevar and liked his manner. Erla remembered the sweet ten-yearold Saevar who didn’t say much to Erla and her sisters when they visited the farm, but smiled a lot and took them to the barn where he showed them how to jump into the hay.
The sweet boy had grown into a troublesome teenager with a reputation for pilfering and petty drug dealing. He was sleeping with
Erla’s good friend, Hulda, and she was bemused: ‘I couldn’t understand her choice, I really didn’t like him.’ Erla was supposed to be making the trip to the United States with Hulda but when she pulled out at the last minute, Saevar took her place.
At least they wouldn’t have to spend long together as the plan was for them to part as soon as they reached JFK airport in New York. Saevar was heading to his family in Massachusetts to sort out an inheritance from his estranged father, Michael, who had been killed in a car crash. Saevar had a complicated relationship with his father who’d believed in the old school parenting of ‘my way or the belt’. And yet his death was a massive blow to Saevar who was adrift with no strong role model to draw him back.
As they chatted on the flight, cocooned alone above the clouds, miles above the real world, Saevar started to work his magic on her, persuading Erla to let him come and stay with her in Buffalo, New York where she was staying with friends.
Buffalo was a city dominated by steel and grain mills, the General Motors car factory and the football stadium where tens of thousands of people would gather in freezing conditions to watch the Buffalo Bills and their star running back OJ Simpson. To Erla, it was beautiful; a welcome respite from Iceland. She had a strong affection for America from her time there as a child when her dad worked as a manager for Icelandair at JFK and the family lived in Long Island. She had fond memories of days at the beach playing with her siblings.
Erla had missed the sprawling American suburbs with their wide, tree-lined streets, full of detached houses with clipped lawns and expansive back gardens. Saevar was not the ideal house guest, though; he had nightmares and would wake, shouting in his sleep. These were the dreams he never discussed with anyone, remnants from a dark chapter in his childhood. This disturbed Erla’s friends and after a few days she decided his behaviour was too much to take. She dispatched her awkward travelling companion to his relatives in Massachusetts while she stayed on in Buffalo, soaking up opportunities she would never get in her provincial hometown.
Buffalo was on the touring circuit so the city’s football stadium would often shake with a different roar, as mega bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd played there. There was also the chance to hang out with musicians, who Erla would never get to see in Iceland, like famous jazz pianist, Chick Corea, who she chatted to at a friend’s college gig.
There was more fun to be had in Washington DC where she stayed with her friend, Steve, whose father was a professor in Icelandic literature. Steve had a mane of black curly hair and a penchant for high leather boots. Saevar had soon tired of his family in Massachusetts, though, and he called Erla every day until she agreed to let him stay with her. It was an early indication of his persistence and growing obsession with Erla.
The three of them would hang out at Georgetown University, lying on the grass smoking joints and planning how to change the world. Saevar never joined in with the smoking or drinking. He had started indulging at a young age; he was 9 years old when he gave up drinking, 16 when he stopped taking hard drugs like LSD – the drug of choice in Iceland at this time, along with cannabis. For Erla, though, this was the life; she could happily stay here forever. She had hitch-hiked from Providence to Maine that summer and was already planning her next trip. America held endless possibilities. When Steve threw a leaving party for Erla, it seemed like the whole neighbourhood turned up. It was the biggest party she had ever been to, there were people everywhere and the booze was flowing. Erla stuck to Coca-Cola, but after a while and a long, particularly dull chat with a Vietnam vet, she began to feel trippy, in a way she hadn’t experienced before and didn’t like. She had tried LSD and thought she might be having a flashback.
She needed to be alone, somewhere quiet. She made her way upstairs looking for a place to lie down and get herself together. She stumbled into an empty bedroom, pitch black except for a tiny red light in the corner. Fumbling her way towards the light, she tripped over Saevar. He was in a mess too, and suspected someone had slipped LSD into his drink. They lay down side by side, listening to Frank Zappa and Pink Floyd and talked for most of the night. ‘We
opened our hearts about everything,’ Erla remembered, ‘it was the most we ever talked, he told me everything.’
There was a lot to tell about Saevar’s first 18 years. He had grown up in the east of Reykjavik, in one of the capital’s poorer neighbourhoods. His dad, Michael, was an American who worked at the air base at Keflavik as a meteorologist. He had fallen for Sigurbjorg, a beautiful blonde Icelandic girl who was the opposite of the swarthy Polish-American.
The couple moved to America but it was short lived and they returned to Iceland several years later where Saevar was born. His sister, Anna, remembers a fun-loving, happy child who loved playing with his siblings and friends. As theirs was the only house on their street with a television there was a constant throng of children who would come to the Cieselskis’ house to watch the TV and Saevar’s father, Michael, would make popcorn and brownies. The Cieselski children would create home-made theatres and put on elaborate shows for their friends with costumes and magic tricks. But behind this happy front, there was a darkness. Saevar’s father believed in firm punishment, that the best way to instil discipline was to use his belt, and he handed out this treatment to Saevar on a regular basis. It was a well-known secret among his friends who grew up alongside him in the narrow warren of streets and anodyne apartment blocks.
Away from the US base at Keflavik foreigners were a rarity –strange beings from other more exotic or scary worlds. Saevar’s surname, Cieselski, a mixture of Jewish and Polish, stood out in the ethnically homogeneous Iceland of the 1960s. Combined with his short stature and slight build it made Saevar an easy target for bullies at school. He began to truant, and then found a protector – a big, beefy kid named Kristjan Vidar Vidarsson. This worried his older sister, Anna, who thought his friends were ‘very intimidating and had a bad reputation among the other students’. Saevar also befriended Albert Klahn Skaftason, who was small, quiet and well-liked because he didn’t cause trouble. The network of streets in east Reykjavik, crammed with pebble-dashed apartment blocks and houses clad in
corrugated iron to protect from the never-ending wind, became their playground.
Sigurdor Stefansson, who grew up in the same neighbourhood and would later become a close friend of Saevar, said, ‘There were very many young guys like them in that neighbourhood who were sort of alley cats – stealing from shops and so on.’
Michael had never truly settled in Iceland. After leaving the airbase at Keflavik he worked as an accountant at a supermarket but he couldn’t speak Icelandic so remained an outsider. His drinking and temper got worse and, unable to cope any longer, Sigurbjorg decided they should split. With Saevar increasingly out of control, she turned to social services for help. Aged just 14, Saevar was sent away to Breidavik, a boarding school for ‘troubled youngsters’.
Breidavik was out in the Westfjords, 300 miles and a day’s drive from the capital. It was a sprawling residential school and farm, set in total isolation 28 miles from the nearest town. When the winter weather closed in it was totally cut off. The only company was the migrating birds who flocked to the dramatic Latrabjarg cliffs and the stunning beach with soft golden sand. The school’s remoteness was a deliberate attempt to return its students to a simpler, rural lifestyle, intended to end their offending behaviour.
Breidavik had been opened by the government in the 1950s under pressure from people in Reykjavik to do something about the surge in anti-social behaviour amoung young boys who were under the age of 15 and so couldn’t be prosecuted. The school was run as a family unit with a housemaster, cook and teacher to look after the seven or so boys who lived there. In the summer, the children helped on the farm, looking after the sheep and cows and preparing hay bales for the winter. The troubled young boys were expected to stay there for up to two years to curb their problem behaviour. It was seen as a huge success story with many boys sent there supposedly cured of their delinquency. When Saevar returned from Breidavik his family were pleased with his academic progress, as his school work had significantly improved.
Breidavik, however, had a dark secret: it was a brutal and horrific place where boys were sexually and physically abused by the staff
and other pupils, far away from any prying eyes of family and friends. It would be many years and many scarred lives before this horrific abuse was exposed. Saevar never revealed the indignity and humiliation meted out by the sadistic teachers and older pupils to his family or friends.
Now, years later, Saevar was lying on the floor of a bedroom in America with Erla next to him and something felt different. In his altered, vulnerable state, Saevar opened up to Erla about the gruesome years he spent at Breidavik. It was during his time there that his brutal yet still beloved father was killed in a car crash. His pain and hurt was compounded when Saevar wasn’t allowed to attend the funeral. Erla would never tell anyone exactly what Saevar revealed to her in that room (‘He would turn in his grave’), but it’s clear he was violently abused by the staff and older boys. As the bright moon melted into a watery sun, Erla began to warm to the difficult, vulnerable young man. They had ‘bonded to the point I could never leave him after that, no matter how hard I tried’.
Saevar and Erla returned to Keflavik airport in time for Christmas 1973. It wasn’t like other airports; it was a huge US naval airbase where fighter planes would be lined up in the hangars waiting to fly off to guard the Atlantic from Soviet warplanes. In the arrivals lounge, Erla’s relatives were waiting to welcome her sister who was visiting from her home in Hawaii.
Erla and Saevar had a less pleasant reception party, lead by the pugnacious head of customs, Kristjan Petursson. A thick-set former policeman built like a rugby player, Petursson was fixated with Saevar. He had been looking for an opportunity to collar the cocksure young man who he was certain was a key figure in the local drugs trade. Petursson believed drugs were swamping Iceland and had successfully lobbied the government to set up a special drugs court. Petursson’s obsession wasn’t shared by the small detective force in Reykjavik, though. Arnprudur Karlsdottir, a nononsense, chain smoking detective – and one of the first women to enter this macho world – thought Petursson was on a wild goose chase, and that he had ‘an agenda to find drugs everywhere. It was
very strange to me and we would talk a lot about it, why is he always after Saevar?’ Petursson seemed convinced if he could get Saevar he would punch a hole in the growing market for cannabis and LSD. He would also make a name for himself.
At the airport, Petursson made sure Erla and Saevar faced the indignity of being strip searched, but while Erla was released, Saevar was taken away for further questioning. Back home, Erla called everywhere trying to find Saevar but he had been swallowed up by the criminal justice system. A week later she was at a party with friends when Saevar showed up. He took hold of her hand and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ They went straight to her apartment and Saevar told her about his week in custody.
Petursson had accused Saevar of having a kilo of morphine stashed away somewhere in Reykjavik. He had been placed in solitary confinement in the basic facilities of Sidumuli prison. This was common practice in Iceland at the time, a way of making suspects more amenable during the interrogation. Saevar maintained his innocence, but this only served to further antagonise the customs chief and Saevar was knocked about a bit, to soften him up. After a week of getting nowhere, Saevar had been released. Although free from custody he was a marked man. The police were biding their time, waiting for the opportunity to catch him and take him off the streets for a long, long time.
Erla had been living with her dad, Bolli, in his apartment in Hafnarfjordur. There wasn’t much to it, two interconnecting living/bedrooms, a bathroom and a laundry room. Erla asked her dad if Saevar could stay with them, which would mean Saevar sharing Erla’s single bed. Her Dad agreed but had one condition, ‘that Saevar needed to do some honest work and get a proper job’. Saevar did occasionally try to enter the world of normal work but it never lasted. He did a stint in the fishing trade out in the Westfjords, but he couldn’t stick it. Saevar was not going to follow a conventional path.
In February 1974 Saevar was arrested again by Kristjan Petursson. Rather than taking him to the police station or prison, Petursson
brought him to his home where he offered him a drink. He wanted Saevar to confess to the biggest jewellery robbery that had ever been committed in Iceland. Saevar said he knew nothing about it but Erla said he later told her, ‘He was frustrated that someone else had gotten away with it. It was a crime he would have liked to get away with, he was always very curious who had done it.’ When this soft approach didn’t work Saevar was taken to Sidumuli for another stint in solitary confinement, this time for a month. Saevar got out of trouble by informing on his fellow small-time dealer and friend, Sigurbor Stefansson, who surprisingly stood by him. (‘I told him I would never do any business with him but I would be his friend.’)
In the 1970s Iceland was still a land of prohibition. There were only three government-run off licences in Reykjavik where you could get expensive spirits but no beer, which was banned, and remained illegal until 1989. This created the ideal environment for cheap smuggled booze and for petty criminals like Saevar to make some money.
Saevar had the gift of the gab and a charm that enabled him to enlist his friends in his criminal schemes. One of these involved exploiting a friend working at the docks where the legal alcohol was shipped in. Saevar would visit him for a chat to distract him so his friends Kristjan and Albert could steal whatever alcohol they could get their hands on. It was hardly a master criminal enterprise but it worked. Over several trips they built up a hoard of whisky, cognac and vodka. Erla was their ‘fence’ who would sell it to her co-workers at the Icelandic Post and Telephone company. As Friday approached, she became popular for being able to get alcohol to get the weekend started.
Saevar needed a longer term regular source of income, however, and he went for the other big vice in 1970s Iceland, drugs. Kristjan Vidar was always at his side; after all, it didn’t hurt to have a well built, tall friend with a reputation for violence to look out for you. Saevar didn’t fit in with the prevailing hippy vibe of the drug dealing community. ‘He was a stranger when he came into the hash business,’ his friend Sigurdor observed, ‘and not many people liked
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Aristotle. The Second Book attacks, with a good deal of acerbity, and some wire-drawing, but also with learning, acuteness, and commonsense, the Aristotelian doctrine of Imitation, and the philosopher’s order and distribution of poetic kinds. The Third follows this up by an inquiry whether, in a general way, Poetry is Imitation at all; the Fourth by one whether the poet is an imitator. And the conclusion of the three, enforced with great dialectical skill, and with a real knowledge of Greek criticism,—that of Plato, Longinus, and the Rhetoricians, as well as Aristotle’s,—is that Poetry is not Imitation, or at any rate that Imitation is not proper and peculiar to poets. In which point it will go hard but any catholic student of literature, however great his respect for Aristotle, must now “say ditto” to Patrizzi.
In his Fifth Book Patrizzi tackles a matter of far greater importance —for after all the discussion, “Is Poetry Imitation, or is it not?” is very mainly a logomachy. As Miss Edgeworth’s philosophic boy remarks, “You may call your hat your cadwallader,” when you have once explained that by this term you mean “a black thing that you wear on your head.” But the question of this Fifth Book, “Whether Poetry can be in prose?” is of a very different kind. It goes, not to words but to things, and to the very roots of them; it involves—if it may not be said actually to be—the gravest, deepest, most vital question of literary criticism itself; and on the answer given to it will turn the further answer which must be given to a whole crowd of minor questions.
On this point il gran Patricio has at least this quality of greatness, that he knows his own mind with perfect clearness, and expounds it as clearly as he knows it. His conclusion[128] is, “That verse is so proper and so essential to every manner of poetry that, without verse, no composition either can or ought to be Poetry.” This is refreshing, whether we consider that Patrizzi has taken the best way of establishing his dogma or not. He proceeds as usual by posing and examining the places—four in number—in which Aristotle deals with the question; and discusses them with proper exactness from the verbal point of view, dwelling specially, as we should expect, on the term ψιλὸς for prose. Then, as we should expect also, he enters into a still longer examination of the very obscure and difficult passage about the Mimes and the Socratic Dialogues. To say that the argument is conducted in a manner wholly free from quibbling
and wire-drawing would perhaps be too much. Patrizzi—and his logic is certainly not the worse for it—was still in the habit of bringing things to directly syllogistic head now and then; and of this modern readers are too often impatient. But he does succeed in convicting Aristotle of using language by no means wholly consistent; and he succeeds still better in getting and keeping fast hold of that really final argument which made De Quincey so angry when Whately so forcibly put it[129]—the argument that from time immemorial everybody, who has had no special point to prove, when speaking of a poem has meant something in verse, that everybody, with the same exception, has called things in verse poems.
Our author’s acuteness is not less seen in the selection and treatment of the subject of his Sixth Book, which is the intimately allied question—indeed, the same question from another point of view—“Whether the Fable rather than the verse makes the property of the poem?” He is equally uncompromising on this point; and has of course no difficulty in showing—against Plutarch rather than Aristotle—that “fable” in the sense of “made-up subject” is not only not necessary to Poetry, but does not exist in any of the most celebrated poems of the most celebrated poets.[130] But he is not even yet satisfied in his onslaught on the Four Places. He devotes a special Book (VII.—it is true that all the constituents of this group of books are short) to Aristotle’s contrast of Empedocles and Homer, labelling the latter only as poet, the former as rather Physiologist. And with this he takes the same course, convicting Aristotle, partly out of his own mouth,[131] partly by citing the “clatter” (schiamaccio) which even his own commentators had made on this subject. And, indeed, at the time even the stoutest Aristotelians must have been puzzled to uphold a judgment which, taken literally, would have excluded from the name of poetry the adored Georgics of old, and the admired Syphilis of recent, times.
But, indefatigable as he is, he is still not “satiate with his victory,” and in the Eighth Book attacks yet another facet of the same great problem, “Whether Poetry can be based upon, or formed from, History?” This was, as we have seen, a question which had already interested the Italians much; and Patrizzi in handling it draws nearer and nearer to his controversy with Tasso, whom he here actually
mentions. He has little difficulty in showing that Aristotle’s contrast between Poetry and History itself by no means denies historical subjects to the poet, and that Aristotle is not at all responsible for, or in accordance with, Plutarch’s extravagant insistence on “mendacity” as a poetic proprium. “All the materials comprised in Art, or Science, or study,” says he[132] (in that manner of his which we have already called refreshing, and which we shall meet again seldom in this volume), “can be suitable subjects for poetry and poems, provided that they be poetically treated.” Verily, a gran Patricio!
The subject of the Ninth Book is less important and more purely antiquarian, but interesting enough. It discusses the question whether ancient poetry necessarily involved “harmony” and “rhythm,” and what these terms exactly mean—dancing and gestic accompaniment being considered as well as music. Patrizzi decides, sensibly enough on the historical comparison, that all these things, though old and not unsuitable companions of poetry, are in no sense formative or constitutive parts of Poetry itself.[133]
The title-question of the Tenth Book is, “Whether the modes of Imitation are three?” He discusses this generally, and specially in regard to narrative and dramatic delivery of the poetic matter, and then passes in an appendix (which, however, he declares to be part of the book) to the Trimerone of reply to Tasso. This is a necessarily rather obscure summary, with some quotations, of a fuller controversy between the two, complicated by glances at the other literature of the Gerusalemme quarrel, especially at the work of Camillo Pellegrino.[134] To disentangle the spool, and wind it in expository form, is out of the question here. Fortunately the piece concludes with a tabular statement[135] of forty-three opposition theses to Pellegrino and Tasso. A good many of these turn on rather “pot-and-kettle” recriminations between Homerists and Ariostians; but the general principles of comparative criticism are fairly observed in them, and there is no acerbity of language. In fact, although on some of the points of the controversy Patrizzi took the Della Cruscan side, it does not seem to have interrupted his friendship with Tasso, who attended his lectures,[136] and whose funeral he attended.
The Trimerone on Tasso.
Remarkable position of Patrizzi.
The intrinsic importance of Patrizzi’s criticism may be matter of opinion; but it will hardly be denied that both its system and its conclusions are widely different from those of nearly all the Italian critics whom we have yet considered, though there may be approaches to both in Cinthio on the one hand and in Castelvetro on the other. The bickering with Aristotle on particular points is of much less importance than the constant implicit, and not rare explicit, reliance on the historic method—on the poets and the poems that exist, the ideas of poetry conveyed by common parlance, the body of the written Word in short, and not the letter of the written Rule. I am not sure that Patrizzi ever lays down the doctrine that “Rules follow practice, not practice rules,” with quite the distinctness of Bruno in the passage cited above.[137] But he makes a fight for it in a passage of the Trimerone, [138] and his entire critical method involves it more or less. If he does not quote modern literature much, it is obviously because the controversy in which he was mixing took its documents and texts mainly from the ancients; but he is so well acquainted with the modern literature, not merely of his own language, that he actually cites[139] Claude Fauchet’s Origines de la Poésie Française, which had appeared in 1581. That his interest in the whole matter may have been philosophical rather than strictly, or at least exclusively, literary is very possible—he was actually a Professor of Philosophy; but however this may be, he has hit on the solid causeway under the floods, and has held his way steadily along it for as far as he chose to go. Nay, in the sentence which has been chosen for the epigraph of this Book, he has kept it open for all to the end of Poetry and of Time.
Sed contra mundum.
There are, however, few propositions in literature truer than this— that it is of no present use to be wise for the future. If a man chooses the wisdom of the morrow, he must be content for the morrow to appreciate him—which it does not always, though no one but a poor creature will trouble himself much about that. Patrizzi had a really considerable reputation, and deserved it; but in matters literary he was two hundred years in front of his time, and his time avenged itself by taking little practical notice of him.[140] The critical writers of the last fifteen or twenty years of the
The latest group of sixteenthcentury Critics.
century are fairly numerous; and though none of them can pretend to great importance, the names of some have survived, and the writings of some of these are worth examination, certainly by the historian and perhaps by the student. But the general drift of them is usually anti-Patrician and pro-Aristotelian, in that very decidedly sophisticated interpretation of Aristotle which was settling itself down upon the world as critical orthodoxy. Among them we may mention one or two which, though actually earlier than Patrizzi, are later than Castelvetro, and will help to complete, as far as we can here attempt it, the conspectus of that remarkable flourishing time of Italian critical inquiry which actually founded, and very nearly finished, the edifice of European criticism generally for three centuries at least. The authors to whom we return are Partenio, Viperano, Piccolomini, Gilio da Fabriano, and Mazzoni; those to whom we proceed are Jason Denores, Gabriele Zinano, and Faustino Summo. This latter, who, with an odd coincidence of name, date, and purport, does really sum up the sixteenth century for Aristotle, and so govern the decisions of the seventeenth and eighteenth, had been immediately preceded in the same sense by Buonamici,[141] Ingegneri,[142] and others.
Partenio.
Partenio, like Minturno and some others, gave his thoughts on the subject to the world in both “vulgar” and “regular”;[143] but the two forms, while not identical, are closer together than is sometimes the case, though there is in the Latin a curious appended anthology of translation and parallel in the two languages. He is rather a formal person (as indeed may be judged from his particular addiction to Hermogenes as an authority), but he is not destitute of wits. Throughout he quotes Italian as well as Latin examples, and refers to Italian critics such as Trissino; while in one place he gives something like a regular survey of contemporary Latin poetry by Italians from Pontanus to Cotta. He lays special stress on the importance of poetic diction; he thinks that Art can and should improve nature; but he is as classical as the stiffest perruque of the French anti-Romantic school in believing Aristotle and Horace to contain everything necessary to poetical salvation.
Viperano.
Viperano[144] (who by a natural error is sometimes cited as Vituperano) somewhere makes the half-admission, half-boast, scripsimus autem varios libros de variis rebus, and is indeed a sort of rhetorical bookmaker who oscillates between instruction and epideictic. This character is sufficiently reflected in his De Arte Poetica. He had some influence—even as far as Spain (v. inf.)
Piccolomini’s book,[145] which is a compact small quarto of 422 pages, differs in arrangement from Castelvetro’s merely in not giving the Greek—the particelle of the original in translation being followed by solid blocks of annotationi The author was of that well-known type of Renaissance scholar which aspired to a generous if perhaps impossible universalism; and as he puts this encyclopædic information at the service of his notes, they are naturally things not easily to be given account of in any small space, or with definite reference to a particular subject. That Piccolomini, however, was not destitute of acuteness or judgment to back his learning, reference to test passages will very easily show. He has not allowed the possible force of the μᾶλλον, for instance, to escape him in the Homer-and-Empedocles passage referred to a little earlier—indeed Maggi had put him in the right way here. But, in this and other cases, he is somewhat too fond of “hedging.” “We must remember this; but we must not forget that,” &c. The inspiriting downrightness of Scaliger on the one side, and Patrizzi on the other, is not in him; and we see the approach, in this subject also, of a time of mere piling up of authorities, and marshalling of arguments pro and con, to the darkening rather than the illumination of judgment.
Piccolomini. Gilio.
The Topica Poetica of Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano[146] comes well next to Piccolomini, because the pair are characteristic examples of the two parallel lines in which, as we have seen throughout, Italian criticism proceeds during the century. In plan it presents no inconsiderable resemblance to that work of our own Puttenham (v. infra) which followed it at no great interval; but it is, as its special title will have indicated to the expert, even more definitely rhetorical. In fact, it must be one of the very latest treatises in which, on the partial precedent of antiquity, Poetics are brought directly under Rhetoric. We actually start with accounts, illustrated by poetical examples in the vernacular, of the Deliberative,
Demonstrative, and Judicial kinds; we pass thence to Invention, Imitation, and Style; and thence again to Decorum, the Proper, and so forth, all still illustrated from the vulgar tongue mainly, but with a Latin example here and there. And this finishes the short First Book. The longer Second is the most strictly “topical,” with its sections (at first sight bewildering to the modern non-expert mind) on Definition and Etymology, on Genus and Species, on Example and Induction, on Proceeding from Less to Greater and from Greater to Less, on Amplification, Authority, Custom, and Love. The Third is wholly on Figures of Speech, and the Fourth on Tropes or Figures of “Conceit.” The poetical illustration is all-pervading, and there is an odd appendix of sonnets from ladies of Petrarch’s time. The book is chiefly worth notice here because, as has been said, it is one of the latest—perhaps, with the exception of Puttenham’s own, the actually latest—of its special subdivision that we shall have to notice,—the subdivision, that is to say, in which the literature handled is absolutely subordinate to an artificial system of classification, in which the stamped and registered ticket is everything, so that, when the critic has tied it on, his task is done.
Giacomo Mazzoni is perhaps better known[147] than at least some of the subjects of this chapter, owing to his connection with Dante.
Mazzoni
.
He first, in 1573, published at Cesena a brief Difesa di Dante of some fifty folios, in fairly large print, and followed it up fourteen years later with an immense Della Difesa, containing 750 pages of very small print without the index. The points of the actual Difesa are not uncurious—such as an argument that discourses on Poetry are not improper for the philosopher, and that Dante is a particularly philosophical poet, in fact encyclopædic. From the Imitation point of view the Comedy can be easily defended, as it is a real following of action, and not the mere relation of a dream: and as dealing with costume (manners) it is a comedy, not a tragedy or heroic poem. The Della Difesa, on the other hand, is a wilderness of erudition and controversy, arranged under abstract heads (“how the poets have conducted themselves towards the predicaments of Time and Place,” &c.), and diverging into inquiries and sub-inquiries of the most intricate character—the trustworthiness of dreams,[148] the opinions held of them in antiquity, the nature and kinds of
Denores . allegory, Dante’s orthodoxy—in short, all things Dantean, and very many others. If I cannot with Mr Spingarn[149] discover “a whole new theory of poetry” in the Difesa itself, I am ready to admit that almost anything might be discovered in the Della Difesa. The Poetica of Jason Denores[150] is remarkable from one point of view for its thoroughgoing and “charcoal-burner” Aristotelianism, from another for the extraordinary and meticulous precision of its typographical arrangements. How many sizes and kinds of type there are in Jason’s book I am not enough of an expert in printing to attempt to say exactly: and the arrangement of his page is as precious as the selection of his type. Sometimes his text overflows the opened sheet, with decent margins indeed but according to ordinary proportions; at others (and by no means always because he requires side-notes) it is contracted to a canal down the centre, with banks broader than itself. It is, however, when Denores comes to the tabular arrangement and subdivision of statement and argument, in which nearly all these writers delight, that he becomes most eccentric. As many divisions, so many parallel columns; under no circumstances will his rigid equity give one section the advantage of appearing on the recto of a leaf while the others are banished to the verso. This is all very well when the divisions are two or three or even four. But when, as sometimes happens, there are six or even eight, the cross-reading of the parallel columns is at once tempting and conducive to madness. As each column is but some half-inch broad, almost every word longer than a monosyllable has to be broken into, and as only a single em of space is allowed between the columns, there is a strong temptation to “follow the line.” By doing this you get such bewilderments as
“gue do-diEdip-di Laio, ttappas-menosia ra il Poe mu tio lipo, per,” &c.,
a moderate dose of which should suffice to drive a person of some imagination, and excessive nerves, to Bedlam. Read straight, however, Denores is much more sedative, not to say soporific, than exciting: and his dealings with Tragedy, the Heroic Poem, and Comedy have scarcely any other interest than as symptoms of that
determination towards unqualified, if not wholly unadulterated, Aristotelianism which has been remarked upon.
Il Sogno, overo della Poesia, by Gabriele Zinano,[151] dedicated at Reggio on the 15th October 1590 to the above-mentioned Ferrando Gonzaga of Guastalla, is a very tiny treatise, written with much pomp of style, but apparently unnoticed by most of the authorities on the subject. The author had studied Patrizzi (or Patrici, as he, too, calls him), and was troubled in his mind about Imitation, and about the equivocal position of Empedocles. He comforts himself as he goes on, and at last comes to a sort of eclectic opportunism, which extols the instruction and delight of poetry, admits that it can practically take in all arts and sciences, but will not admit fable as making it without verse, or verse without fable, and denies that both, even together, make it necessarily good. The little piece may deserve mention for its rarity, and yet once more, as symptomatic of the hold which critical discussion had got of the Italian mind, Zinano is evidently full of the Deca Istoriale and the Deca Disputata, but alarmed at their heresies.
Zinano.
Mazzone da Miglionico, &c.
Paolo Beni, the antagonist of Summo, the champion of prose for tragedy as well as for comedy, and a combatant in the controversy over the Pastor Fido, which succeeded in time, and almost equalled in tedium, that over the Gerusalemme, will come best in the next Book; and though I have not neglected, I find little to say about, Correa[152] and others.[153] A sign of the times is the somewhat earlier I Fiori della Poesia[154] of Mazzone da Miglionico (not to be confounded with the abovementioned Mazzoni), a tightly packed quarto of five hundred pages, plus an elaborate index. This is a sort of “Bysshe” ante Bysshium—a huge gradus of poetic tags from Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, arranged ready for anybody who wishes to pursue the art of poetry according to the principles of Vida. Here you may find choice of phrases to express the ideas of “going to bed for the purpose of sleeping,” of “black and beautiful eyes,” of “shoes that hurt the feet,” and of “horses that run rapidly.” It was inevitable that this manual at once and reductio ad absurdum of the mechanic Art of Poetical Imitation should come—indeed, others had preceded Mazzone, for instance
Fabricius, in Germany (see next Book). But one cannot help invoking a little woe on those by whom it came.
Summo.
The twelve Discorsi[155] of Faustino Summo manage to cover as many questions in their 93 leaves: the end of Poetry; the meaning of the word philanthropia;[156] the last words (the purgation clause) of the Definition of Tragedy; the possibility of a happy ending; the representation of atrocities and deaths; the admissibility of true fables; the necessity of unity of action; the propriety of drama in prose; furor poeticus; the sufficiency of verse to make poetry; the legitimacy of tragi-comedy and pastoral; and the quality of the Pastor Fido. Summo gives us our last word here with singular propriety. He is not quite Aristotelian to the point of infallibility, and his orthodoxy is what may be called a learned orthodoxy—that is to say, he is careful to quote comments or arguments of many of the writers whom we have mentioned in this chapter and the last, from Trissino to Denores, and of a few whom we have not. But in him this orthodoxy is in the main constituted: it is out of the stage of formation and struggle; and it is ready—all the more so that many of its documents have already passed with authority to other countries and languages—to take its place as the creed of Europe.
97. My copy is the second edition (apud Petrum Santandreanum, s. l., 1581).
98. This joke requires a little explanation and adaptation to get it into English. The Latin is miror majores nostros sibi tam iniquos fuisse ut factoris vocem maluerint oleariorum cancellis circumscribere. In fact, Fattojo and Fattojano, if not fattore, do mean in Italian “Oil-Press” and “Oil-Presser.”
99. Scaliger goes so far as to say that “it would be better never to have read” the Symposium and the Phædrus, because of their taint with the Grœcanicum scelus.
100. The decision of this is all the more remarkable that Scaliger does not, as unwary moderns might expect, make verse the form of Poetry, but the matter Feet, rhythm, metre, these are the things that Poetry works in, her stuff, her raw material. The skill of the poet in its various applications is the form. A very little thought will show this to
be the most decisive negation possible of the Wordsworthian heresy —anticipated by many sixteenth-century writers, from Italy to England, and though not exactly authorised, countenanced by the ancients, from Aristotle downwards—that verse is not essential in any way.
101. One cannot help thinking that this distinction, which is quite contrary to those entertained by Aristotle and Quintilian, must have been influenced by the cadences of the modern languages—Italian and French—with which Scaliger was familiar. In both, but especially in French, the actual “measuring-off” of syllables was the be-all and end-all of metre, the easements provided in English and German by syllabic equivalence being in French refused altogether, in Italian replaced only by the more meagre aid of syncope and apocope.
102. As, even throughout the neo-classic age, very orthodox neoclassics admitted, especially in the “Musæus v. Homer” case.
103. Varietas poetices κομητικὴ, sicut Cypassis Corinnæ. The text has κομωτικὴ, which I do not find.
104. Spingarn, p. 172. “Disinterested treatment” of practical problems, such as poems certainly are, “wholly aside from all practical considerations,” sometimes leads to awkward results.
105. Mr Spingarn (p. 94) apparently states that he “formulated” them, but the gist of the next two pages fully corrects this slip or ambiguity; and he has himself pointed out with equal decision and correctness that the French assumption contained in the phrase, Unités Scaligériennes, is unfounded.
106. P. 365.
107. Vienna, 1570. My copy is the second enlarged and improved issue, which appeared at Basle five years later. I have also the companion edition of Petrarch (Basle, 1582), and the Opere Varie Critiche, published, with a Life, by Muratori, in 4to (Lione, 1727). Besides these he wrote an “exposition” of Dante, which was lost, and he is said, by Muratori, to have been never tired of reading, and discovering new beauties in, Boccaccio. Bentley, Diss. on Phal., ed. 1817, p. liii, defending Castelvetro against Boyle, says that “his books have at this present time such a mighty reputation, that they are sold for their weight in silver in most countries of Europe.” I am glad that this is not true now, for the Poetic by itself weighs nearly 3
lb. But Europe often makes its valuations worse. I have seen, though not bought, a copy for a shilling in these days.
108. See the curious remarks of Salviati, printed from MS. by Mr Spingarn (op. cit., p. 316). Salviati thinks that Castelvetro too often wrote to show off subtlety of opinion, and to be not like other people.
109. Op. Var., p. 83 sq.
110. Op. Var., pp. 288-306.
111. In fact, he subordinates the first to the other two. They make it necessary. In order to appreciate his views, it is necessary to read the commentary on all the Aristotelian places concerned, and also on that touching Epic.
112. P. 101.
113. Poet. d’Arist., p. 278.
114. Poet. d’Arist., pp. 585, 586.
115. Ibid., p. 576.
116. Ibid., p. 23.
117. Poet. d’Arist., p. 545. It is fair to say that the ban is only pronounced in reference to a single point—the management of speeches.
118. Ibid., p. 23.
119. Poet. d’Arist., p. 158.
120. It is perhaps well to meet a possible, though surely not probable objection “Do you deny ranks in poetry?” Certainly not—but only the propriety of excluding ranks which do not seem, to the censor, of the highest.
121. At Venice, but ad instanza of a Ferrarese bookseller.
122. These pieces form the major part of Cesare Guasti’s Prose Diverse di T. T. (2 vols., Florence, 1875).
123. For instance, my attention was drawn by Mr Ker to the fact that the description of the subject of the third original Discorso given at the end of the second (f. 24 original ed. vol. i. p. 48, Guasti) does not in the least fit the actual contents, while the missing matter is duly supplied in the later book (i. 162 sq., Guasti).
124 For instance in the opening of the first Discorsi (f. 2, verso): Variamente tessendolo, di commune proprio, e di vecchio novo il facevano.
125. Bruno himself, in more places than one, takes the same line; indeed his statement in the Eroici Furori, that “the rules are derived from the poetry, and there are as many kinds and sorts of true rules as there are kinds and sorts of true poets,” is the conclusion of the whole matter, and would have done his friend Sidney a great deal of good. (The passage may be found at p. 38 of the first vol. of the translation by I. Williams (London, 1887, or in the original, ed. Lagarde, p. 625).) But Bruno’s genius, as erratic as it was brilliant, could not settle to mere Rhetoric.
126. Especially when they are contrasted with the superciliousness (v. supra) of Lilius Giraldus and Scaliger.
127. It would be rather interesting to know whether the Furor Poeticus of the second part of the Return from Parnassus has anything to do with Patrizzi. There need be no connection, of course; but the correspondence of England and Italy at this time in matters literary was so quick and intimate that there might have been. Patrizzi’s book appeared in the probable year of Shakespeare’s going to London, and of the production of Tamburlaine. Bruno had then left England.
128. Deca Disputata, p. 122.
129. See Whately, Rhetoric, III. iii. 3, p. 216 (ed. 8, London, 1857), and De Quincey, Rhetoric (Works, ed. Masson, x. 131).
130. Deca Disputata, p. 134 sq.
131. Of course an Aristotelian advocate may justly point out that the Master after all only says μᾶλλον ἢ ποιητὴν, without absolutely denying the latter title to Empedocles.
132. Deca Disputata, p. 175.
133. Deca Disputata, p. 192.
134. Who had been pars non minima in the exaltation of Tasso and depreciation of Ariosto. See Spingarn, pp. 122, 123; and Serassi, Vita di Tasso (Rome, 1785), pp. 331-348.
135. Deca Disputata, pp. 246-249.
136. This was long after the publication of the Trimerone (1586), and when Patrizzi had been translated from Ferrara to a newly
founded chair of Platonic Philosophy at Rome, V Serassi, op. cit., p. 475.
137. P. 95.
138. Pp. 221, 222. Of course it is possible to take exception even to poeticamente—to ask “Yes; but what is this?” But the demurrer is only specious. The very adverbial form shifts the sovereignty from the subject to the treatment.
139. Ibid., p. 235.
140. The way in which Patrizzi is referred to after the lapse of a century by Baillet and Gibert (v inf., p 320) shows at once the sort of magni nominis umbra which still made itself felt, and the absence of any definite knowledge to give body to the shade. For his dealings with Rhetoric, see next Book, p. 329.
141. Discorsi Poetici, 1597.
142. Poesia Rappresentativa, 1598.
143. Della Imitatione Poetica, Venice, 1560; De Poetica Imitatione, ibid., 1565.
144. His De Arte Poetica seems to have first appeared at Antwerp in 1579: I know it in his Opera, Naples, 1606.
145. Annotationi di M. Alessandro Piccolomini nel Libro della Poetica d’Aristotele: Vinegia. The dedication to Cardinal Ferdinand dei Medici is dated Ap. 20, 1572, from Piccolomini’s native town of Sienna, where he became co-adjutor-archbishop. Some of Salviati’s MS. observations, printed by Mr Spingarn, seem to show that even Piccolomini’s contemporaries regarded him as a little too polymathic, while his Raffaella exhibits the less grave side of the Renaissance. But he was now getting an old man, and died six years later at the full three score and ten.
146. In Venetia, 1580. Why has Time, in the title-page woodcut of this, an hour-glass as head-dress, but a scourge instead of a scythe in his hand?
147. Milton had read Mazzoni, and cites him.
148 There is a large folding table of the causes and kinds of visions.
149. Op. cit., p. 124.
150. Padua, 1588. Denores (whose name is often separated into “de Nores”) was, like Patrizzi, a Professor of Philosophy, and, like
Piccolomini, very polymathic and polygraphic. He had a year earlier published a Discourse (which I have not) on the Philosophical Principles of poetical kinds, and had very much earlier still, in 1553, commented the Epistola ad Pisones. His son Pietro was an affectionate and attentive disciple of Tasso’s in his last days at Rome.
151. I have not found much about Zinano near to hand, nor have I thought it worth while to go far afield in search of him. Tiraboschi (vii., 1716, 1900) names him as a poet-miscellanist in almost every kind. My copy, of 42 duodecimo pages, has been torn out of what was its cover, and may have been its company.
152. His Explanationes de Arte Poetica (Rome, 1587) are simply notes on Horace.
153. I have not yet been able to see L. Gambara, De Perfecta Poeseos Ratione (Rome, 1576), and I gather that Mr Spingarn was in the same case, as he refers not to the book, but to Baillet. According to that invaluable person (iii. 70), Gambara must have been an early champion of the uncompromisingly religious view of Poetry which appears in several French seventeenth-century writers, and in our own Dennis. The poet is not even to introduce a heathen divinity.
154. Venice, 1592-93.
155. Padua, 1600.
156. Cf. Butcher, op. cit., p. 297 and note.
