DICTUM

(Lat. something said.) A word used in common parlance to signify the arbitrament or award of a judge. Dl'CTYOTHETON. {GT.itx7vov,aneUa.-nA'rtBr,fJU,I place.) In Ancient Architecture, masonry worked in courses like the meshes of a net. Also open lattice work for admitting light and air. DIDACTIC {Gr. hSatrxai, I teach), in the schools, signifies every species of writing, whether in verse or prose, whose object is to teach or explain the rules or principles of any art or science. Thus to this cla of literature belong the writings of Aristotle on grammar, poetry, and rhetoric; Long in us's Treatise on the Sublime; and the Inst iiutiones of Quintilian, . But the term has been borrowed from scholastic phraseology, and appropriated more exclusively to all poetical writings devoted to the communication of instruction on a particular subject, or of a reflective or ethical character, thence called didactic poetry. Were this the place for such investigations, it might be easily shown that the didactic must have been among the first species of poetical composition; and that the writings of the earliest poets of whom Erofane history makes mention, such as Orpheus and lin us, might with propriety be cla ed under this category. But be this as it may, this species of poetry has been in use from a very remote period, and there is scarcely any nation in which it has not taken root. Among the most celebrated poems of this species may be reckoned in ancient times that of Lucretius, De Rerum Naiurd, in which the Epicurean system of phflosophy is explained; Virgil's Georpcs, which has almost always served as a model to the didactic poets of succeeding ages; and Horace's Art of Foetrp; and in more recent times. Pope's E ays on Critic is in and Man; Du Fresnoy's A7-t of Painting (see Mason's translation in the Literary Works of Sir J. Reynolds); Vida and Boileau's Art of Poetry; Akenside s Pleasures of the Imagination; Armstrong's Art of Preserving Health; Somerville's Chace; Dyer's Fleece; Young's Universal Pa ion, . The reader will find in Blair's Lectures, vol. iii., a jfuU exposition of the nature and characteristics of this species of poetry, and a critical notice of the most famed didactic poems of all ages and eountries. [s. 353]