d breeding, and save his friends the
trouble of coming up to his bedchamber; all this appears to me to be
improbable, incredible, impossible."

Such is the censure of Dennis. There is, as Dryden expresses it, perhaps
"too much horse-play in his railleries;" but if his jests are coarse,
his arguments are strong. Yet, as we love better to be pleased than
to be taught, Cato is read, and the critic is neglected. Flushed with
consciousness of these detections of absurdity in the conduct, he
afterwards attacked the sentiments of Cato; but he then amused himself
with petty cavils and minute objections.

Of Addison's smaller poems no particular mention is necessary; they have
little that can employ or require a critic. The parallel of the princes
and gods in his verses to Kneller is often happy, but is too well known
to be quoted. His translations, so far as I compared them, want the
exactness of a scholar. That he understood his authors, cannot be
doubted; but his versions will not teach others to understand them,
being too licentiously paraphrastical. They are, however, for the
most part, smooth and easy; and, what is the first excellence of a
translator, such as may be read with pleasure by those who do not know
the originals. His poetry is polished and pure; the product of a mind
too judicious to commit faults, but not sufficiently vigorous to attain
excellence. He has sometimes a striking line, or a shining paragraph;
but in the whole he is warm rather than fervid, and shows more dexterity
than strength. He was, however, one of our earliest examples of
correctness. The versification which he had learned from Dryden he
debased rather than refined. His rhymes are often dissonant; in his
Georgic he admits broken lines. He uses both triplets and Alexandrines,
but triplets more frequently in his translation than his other works.
The mere structure of verses seems never to have engaged much of his
care. But his lines are very smooth in Rosamond, and too smooth in Cato.

Addison is now to be considered as a critic: a name which the present
generation is scarcely willing to allow him. His criticism is condemned
as tentative or experimental rather than scientific; and he is
considered as deciding by taste rather than by principles.

It is not uncommon for those who have grown wise by the labour of others
to add a little of their own, and overlook their masters. Addison is now
despised by some who perhaps would never have seen hi