the drama, "An Apology for Heroic
Poetry," and the use of what is technically called "the machinery"
employed in it.

Upon the whole, it may be justly questioned, whether Dryden shewed his
judgment in the choice of a subject which compelled an immediate
parallel betwixt Milton and himself, upon a subject so exclusively
favourable to the powers of the former. Indeed, according to Dennis,
notwithstanding Dryden's admiration of Milton, he evinced sufficiently
by this undertaking, what he himself confessed twenty years
afterwards, that he was not sensible of half the extent of his
excellence. In the "Town and Country Mouse," Mr Bayes is made to term
Milton "a rough unhewen fellow;" and Dryden himself, even in the
dedication to the Translation from Juvenal, a work of his advanced
life, alleges, that, though he found in that poet a true sublimity,
and lofty thoughts, clothed with admirable Grecisms, he did not find
the elegant turn of words and expression proper to the Italian poets
and to Spenser. In the same treatise, he undertakes to excuse, but not
to justify Milton, for his choice of blank verse, affirming that he
possessed neither grace nor facility in rhyming. A consciousness of
the harmony of his own numbers, and a predilection for that kind of
verse, in which he excelled, seemed to have encouraged him to think he
could improve the "Paradise Lost." Baker observes but too truly, that
the "State of Innocence" recals the idea reprobated by Marvell in his
address to Milton:

Or if a work so infinite be spanned,
Jealous I was, lest some less skilful hand,
Such as disquiet always what is well,
And by ill-imitating would excel,
Might hence presume the whole creation's day
To change in scenes, and shew it in a play.

The "State of Innocence" seems to have been undertaken by Dryden
during a cessation of his theatrical labours, and was first published
in 1674, shortly after the death of Milton, which took place on the
8th of November in the same year.

Footnotes:
1. The Adamo of Andreini; for an account of which, see Todd's Milton,
Vol. I. the elegant Hayley's Conjectures on the Origin of Paradise
Lost, and Walker's Memoir on Italian Tragedy. The Drama of Andreini
opens with a grand chorus of angels, who sing to this purpose:

Let the rainbow be the fiddle-stick to the fiddle of heaven,
Let the spheres be the strings, and the stars the musical notes;
Let the new-born breezes make t