d natural, dwelt on the passage in which Adam tells his thoughts
upon first falling asleep, soon after his creation. This passage he
contrasts with the same apprehension of Annihilation ascribed to Eve
in a much lower sense by Dryden in his operatic version of _Paradise
Lost_. In _Tatlers_ and _Spectators_ Steele and Addison had been equal
contributors to the diffusion of a sense of Milton's genius. In Addison
it had been strong, even when, at Oxford, in April, 1694, a young man
trained in the taste of the day, he omitted Shakespeare from a rhymed
Account of the chief English Poets, but of Milton said:

_Whate'er his pen describes I more than see,
Whilst evry verse, array'd in majesty,
Bold and sublime, my whole attention draws,
And seems above the critics nicer laws_.

Eighteen years older than he was when he wrote that, Addison now
prepares by a series of Saturday Essays,--the Saturday Paper which
reached many subscribers only in time for Sunday reading, being always
set apart in the _Spectator_ for moral or religious topics, to show
that, judged also by Aristotle and the "critics nicer laws," Milton was
even technically a greater epic poet than either Homer or Virgil. This
nobody had conceded. Dryden, the best critic of the outgoing generation,
had said in the Dedication of the Translations of _Juvenal_ and
_Persius_, published in 1692,

"As for Mr. Milton, whom we all admire with so much Justice, his
Subject, is not that of an Heroick Poem, properly so call'd: His
Design is the Losing of our Happiness; his Event is not prosperous,
like that of all other _Epique_ Works" (Dryden's French spelling of
the word Epic is suggestive. For this new critical Mode was one of the
fashions that had been imported from Paris); "His Heavenly Machines
are many, and his Human Persons are but two. But I will not take Mr.
_Rymer's_ work out of his Hands: He has promised the World a Critique
on that Author; wherein, tho he will not allow his Poem for Heroick,
I hope he will grant us, that his Thoughts are elevated, his Words
sounding, and that no Man has so happily copy'd the manner of Homer;
or so copiously translated his Grecisms and the Latin Elegancies of
Virgil. Tis true he runs into a Flat of Thought, sometimes for a
Hundred Lines together, but tis when he is got into a Track of
Scripture ... Neither will I justify _Milton_ for his Blank Verse,
tho I may excuse him, by the Example of _Hana