destroys their interest. In this piece, the ecclesiastical state of the country at that period is allegorically shadowed out under the pastoral fiction, and the writer has indulged his religious zeal while lamenting his friend. Moreover, it borrows its form from classical imitation, and abounds in allusions drawn from that source. constructions are also occasionally harsh, and the language obscure. All these circumstances will deduct from your pleasure in reading it; yet there are passages in which I think you cannot fail to recognise the master-hand of a true poet.

The

I should now proceed to "Paradise Lost," but it will be proper to allow you a pause before entering upon so dignified a subject. Adieu then for the present.

Yours, &c.

LETTER

LETTER X.

It will give you an exalted idea of the rank epic poetry holds amidst the productions of human genius, to be told, that there are scarcely half a dozen compositions of this class which have commanded an admiration unlimited by age or country. I believe, indeed, that strict poetical orthodoxy admits in the list of capital epic poems no more than the Iliad of Homer, the Eneid of Virgil, the Jerusalem Delivered of Tasso, and the Paradise Lost of Milton. It might be suspected that the admission of the two moderns into the favoured number was the work of national partiality: but enlightened Europe has long concurred in paying this honour to the Italian, whose language has been sufficiently familiar to the votaries of polite literature in different countries, to render

them

them adequate judges of his merit. With respect to the Englishman, it cannot be denied that his own countrymen were till a late period almost exclusively the heralds of his fame: but the increasing prevalence of the English language, and reputation of its writers, upon the continent, have produced a very extended impression of his superior genius; and his peculiar character of the sublimest of poets is acknowledged in Italy and Germany as much as in his own country.

The "Paradise Lost" is founded upon the history of the Fall of Man as recorded in the book of Genesis, to which Milton has closely and literally adhered as far as it would serve him as a guide. His additions chiefly relate to that interference of superior agents which constitutes the machinery of the poem, and which his n fancy has erected upon the groundwork of an obscure tradition concerning a defection of the angelic host, headed by Satan, and terminating in the expulsion of the rebels

from

from the celestial mansions. It is peculiar to this poem, that what in others constitutes only an appendage to the story, here forms the principal subject; for, as it was impossible that the adventures of a single pair of human beings in their state of simplicity should furnish matter for copious and splendid narration, it was necessary for the poet to seek elsewhere for the great fund of epic action. He has therefore exercised his invention in forming a set of superhuman personages, of opposite characters, to whom he has adapted appropriate scenery, and whom he has employed in operations suited to their supposed nature. Thus he has been borne in the regions of fancy to a height never before reached by a poet; for the most ardent imagination can frame no conceptions of novelty and sublimity which may not find scope in scenes where the mightiest of created beings, and even the Creator himself, are actors, and where the field of action is the immensity of space, and the regions

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regions of heaven, hell, and chaos. At the same time, the plan of the work provides an agreeable repose to the mind fatigued by the contemplation of dazzling wonders, in occasional descents to a new world, fresh in youthful beauty, and as yet the abode of peace and innocence. Milton's genius has been supposed best suited to the grand and elevated, chiefly because his subject was most fertile in images and sentiments of that class; but his pictures of Paradise display ideas of the graceful and beautiful, which, perhaps, no poet has surpassed.

The excellencies and defects of Paradise Lost have occupied the pens of so many able writers, that I think it unnecessary to detain you with any minute discussion of them. You may find some very entertaining papers of Addison in the Spectator upon this subject, and some masterly criticism by Dr. Johnson in his life of Milton prefixed to the edition of English Poets. I shall, however, make a few general observation