ABSTRACT
Such was the theory of praise which the Renaissance inherited from the rhetoricians of the ancient world.4 It is true that not every Elizabethan pane gyrist is successful in observing Aristotle’s important distinction between praise and flattery that is to say, between the celebration of a moral ideal through the vehicle of a person, a city or an institution and the defence of a particular individual’s conduct or policies. (It is one of the chief faults of the fifth book of The Faerie Queene that it descends from the former to the latter.) Never theless, it was a belief which was fundamental to a didactic theory of literature that, by giving praise, the reward o f vertue, to vertuous acts..fi the poet might in turn inspire acts of virtue.
