Renaissance concepts of the relationship between artistically composed language and the true nature of things are usually bound almost inextricably with the presupposition that the genesis of literary composition lies in rhetoric and in the imitation of model authors. As Scaliger puts it (Poetices libri septem, v.x): ‘We have a method of expressing the nature of things, for we imitate what our predecessors have said in exactly the same way as they imitated nature’. Even so, not all sixteenth-century concepts of literature entail literary imitation. It is, for example, virtually absent from writing which primarily invites an allegorical rather than a rhetorical reading. Allegorical interpretation may draw on other authors as repositories of information, but it is an essentially non-rhetorical mode in that it fundamentally depends on the reader's freedom to substitute one sign for another or one signified for another according to associative formulae which have nothing to do with concepts of style found in classical rhetoric. In rhetorically constituted discourse, meaning is derived from the choice and arrangement of words. In the sixteenth century the influence of classical rhetoric was paramount, and the lessons of humanist rhetoric were largely lessons in how to write like admired exemplars of literary expression in the ancient languages. The history of literary criticism in our period is therefore to a large extent a history of which models were recommended for imitation, of instructions as to how they were to be imitated, and of the side-effects of such prescriptions.