most celebrated of modern
Epic Poets, are infinitely excelled in propriety of design, of
sentiment, and style, by Horace and Virgil, it would be serious
trifling to attempt to prove: but Milton, perhaps, will not so easily
resign his claim to equality, if not to superiority. Let it, however,
be remembered, that if Milton be enabled to dispute the prize with the
great champions of antiquity, it is entirely owing to the sublime
conceptions he has copied from the book of God. These, therefore, must
be taken away before we begin to make a just estimate of his genius;
and from what remains, it cannot, I presume, be said with candour and
impartiality, that he has excelled Homer in the sublimity and variety
of his thoughts, or the strength and majesty of his diction.

Shakespear, Corneille, and Racine, are the only modern writers of
Tragedy, that we can venture to oppose to Eschylus, Sophocles, and
Euripides. The first is an author so uncommon and eccentric, that we
can scarcely try him by dramatic rules. In strokes of nature and
character, he yields not to the Greeks: in all other circumstances
that constitute the excellence of the drama, he is vastly inferior. Of
the three moderns, the most faultless is the tender and exact Racine:
but he was ever ready to acknowledge, that his capital beauties were
borrowed from his favourite Euripides; which, indeed, cannot escape
the observation of those who read with attention his Phaedra and
Andromache. The pompous and truly Roman sentiments of Corneille are
chiefly drawn from Luoan and Tacitus; the former of whom, by a strange
perversion of taste, he is known to have preferred to Virgil. His
diction is not so pure and mellifluous, his characters not so various
and just, nor his plots so regular, so interesting, and simple, as
those of his pathetic rival. It is by this simplicity of fable alone,
when every single act, and scene, and speech, and sentiment, and word,
concur to accelerate the intended event, that the Greek tragedies kept
the attention of the audience immoveably fixed upon one principal
object, which must be necessarily lessened, and the ends of the drama
defeated, by the mazes and intricacies of modern plots.

The assertion of Addison with respect to the first particular,
regarding the higher kinds of poetry, will remain unquestionably true,
till nature in some distant age, for in the present, enervated with
luxury, she seems incapable of such an effort, shall produce som