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Boileau's L'Art Poétique, 1673, inspired by Horace's Ars Poetica, was a treatise in verse upon the rules of correct composition, and it gave the law in criticism for over a century, not only in France, but in Germany and England. It gave English poetry a didactic turn and started the fashion of writing critical essays in riming couplets.
In one word, if it be best and most fitting to write poetry in the style in which almost everyone has been trying to write it since Pope and plain sense went out, and Shelley and the seventh heaven came in; let it be so written: and let him who most perfectly so "sets the age to music," be presented by the assembled guild of critics, not with the obsolete and too classical laurel, but with an electro-plated brass medal, bearing the due inscription, Ars est nescire artem.
Wherefore poetic has this in common with rhetoric; that both are the servants of the state. Vossius thus, like Scaliger, makes poetic and rhetoric one in their end to promote desirable action. How persistent is this rhetorical view of poetry is well illustrated by the Ars Rhetorica of the Jesuit Martin Du Cygne, first published in 1666, and still used as a text-book in Georgetown University.
It represented a step forward in civilization; it revealed love not as a mere animal instinct or a mere pledged duty, but as a complex, humane, and refined relationship which demanded cultivation; "arte regendus amor." Boccaccio made a wise teacher put Ovid's Ars Amatoria into the hands of the young.
One of them, generally known as the "Ars Poetica," was perhaps left unfinished at his death. In his youth Horace had been an aristocrat, but his choice of sides was perhaps more the result of accident than of conviction, and he afterward acquiesced without great difficulty in the imperial government.
'It was, he writes, 'a pine-apple of the finest flavour, which had a high zest indeed among the heath-covered mountains of Scotia. Garrick Corres. i. 621. See ante, p. 115. See ante, i. 97. 'Though Birnam wood be come to Dunsinane. Macbeth, act v. sc. 8. 'From his first entrance to the closing scene Let him one equal character maintain. FRANCIS. Horace, Ars Poet. l. 126.
Having confessed from youth upward that her ambition was "to make the most of herself," there had never, in her case, been any question of the ars celare artem. She belonged to a number of women's clubs of which the avowed object was "self-improvement," and attended such classes on "current events" as would keep her posted on the problems of the day without the bore of reading the papers.
This being probably the first institution of commerce before the Ars Cauponaria was invented, and merchants, instead of robbing, began to cheat and outwit each other, and by degrees changed the Metabletic, the only kind of traffic allowed by Aristotle in his Politics, into the Chrematistic.
His petitions ascended to the throne of God, who, during the thirty years of the cure's life at Ars, was pleased to send innumerable sinners to Ars to be reconciled. Many of these sank at his feet already prepared, for they had heard from others that it was sweet and easy to confess one's sins to the saintly priest and under his guidance, to repent of them with their whole heart.
BOSWELL. The 'eloquent historian' was Gibbon. See Paley's Principles, ed. 1786, p. 395. See ante, i. 353, note 1. Ovid, Ars Amatoria, iii. 121. 'This facile temper of the beauteous sex Great Agamemnon, brave Pelides proved. These two lines follow the four which Boswell quotes. Agis, act iv. Agis, a tragedy, by John Home. See ante, p. 27. A misprint, I suppose, for designing.
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