les, Ulysses, and AEneas.]]

[Footnote 3: Poetics, cap. xi.]

[Footnote 4: that]

[Footnote 5: Dediction of the AEneid; where, after speaking of small
claimants of the honours of the Epic, he says,

Spencer has a better for his "Fairy Queen" had his action been
finished, or been one; and Milton if the Devil had not been his hero,
instead of Adam; if the giant had not foiled the knight, and driven
him out of his stronghold, to wander through the world with his
lady-errant; and if there had not been more machining persons that
human in his poem.]

[Footnote 6: [or]]

[Footnote 7: [Episode]]

[Footnote 8: [greater]]

[Footnote 9: Poetics, cap. xxv. The reason he gives is that when the
Poet speaks in his own person he is not then the Imitator. Other Poets
than Homer, Aristotle adds,

ambitious to figure throughout themselves, imitate but little and
seldom. Homer, after a few preparatory lines, immediately introduces a
man or woman or some other character, for all have their character.

Of Lucan, as an example of the contrary practice, Hobbes said in his
Discourse concerning the Virtues of an Heroic Poem:

No Heroic Poem raises such admiration of the Poet, as his hath done,
though not so great admiration of the persons he introduceth.]

[Footnote 10: Letters to Atticus, Bk. xiii., Ep. 44.]

[Footnote 11: Poetices, Lib. iii. cap. 25.]

[Footnote 12: [of]]

[Footnote 13: [which]]

[Footnote 14: Rhetoric, iii. ch. II, where he cites such verbal jokes
as, You wish him [Greek: persai] (i.e. to side with Persia--to ruin
him), and the saying of Isocrates concerning Athens, that its
sovereignty [Greek: archae] was to the city a beginning [Greek: archae]
of evils. As this closes Addison's comparison of Milton's practice with
Aristotle's doctrine (the following papers being expressions of his
personal appreciation of the several books of Paradise Lost), we may
note here that Milton would have been quite ready to have his work tried
by the test Addison has been applying. In his letter to Samuel Hartlib,
sketching his ideal of a good Education, he assigns to advanced pupils
logic and then

rhetoric taught out of the rules of Plato, Aristotle, Phalereus,
Cicero, Hermogenes, Longinus. To which poetry would be made
subsequent, or, indeed, rather precedent, as being less subtile and
fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate. I mean not here the
prosody of a