was that of Lorenzo de' Medici, and his son Leo the Tenth; wherein painting was revived, and poetry flourished, and the Greek language was restored.*

Examples in all these are obvious: but what I would infer is this; that in such an age, it is possible some great genius may arise, to equal any of the ancients; abating only for the language. For great contemporaries whet and cultivate each other; and mutual borrowing, and commerce, makes the common riches of learning, as it does of the civil government.

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But suppose that Homer and Virgil were the only of their species, and that Nature was so much worn out in producing them, that she is never able to bear the like again, yet the example only holds in heroick poetry in tragedy and satire, I offer myself to maintain, against some of our modern criticks, that this age and the last, particularly in England, have excelled the ancients in both those

2 In the age of Lorenzo de' Medici and Leo the Tenth, that is, from about the middle of the fifteenth century to the death of the latter in 1521, flourished Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso, Vida, Sanazarius, Fracastorius, Bembo, Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Titian.-The great restorer of Greek learning in Italy was Leontius Pilatus, who was the first Greek Professor at Florence, (from 1360 to 1363) and was the instructor of Boccace and Petrarch. An account of him may be found in Gibbons's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," vol. vi. p. 421, 4to.

3 Alit æmulatio ingenia; et nunc invidia, nunc admiratio, incitationem accendit; naturaque, quod summo studio petitum est, adscendit in summum. VEL. PATERC. i.17.

kinds; and I would instance in Shakspeare of the former, of your lordship in the latter sort.*

Thus I might safely confine myself to my native country. But if I would only cross the seas, I might find in France a living Horace and a Juvenal, in the person of the admirable Boileau; whose numbers are excellent, whose expressions are noble, whose thoughts are just, whose language is pure, whose satire is pointed, and whose sense is close. What he borrows from the ancients, he repays with usury of his own, in coin as good, and almost as universally valuable: for, setting prejudice and partiality apart, though he is our enemy, the stamp of a Louis, the patron of all arts, is not much inferiour to the medal of an Augustus Cæsar. Let this be said without entering into the interests of factions and parties, and relating only to the bounty of that king to men of learning and merit: a praise so just, that even we who are his enemies, cannot refuse it to him.

Now if it may be permitted me to go back again to the consideration of epick poetry, I have confessed, that no man hitherto has reached, or so much as approached to the excellencies of Homer or of Virgil; I must farther add, that Statius, the

* "Would it be imagined (says Dr. Johnson) that, of this rival to antiquity, all the Satires were little personal invectives, and that his longest composition was a song of eleven stanzas? The blame, however, of this exaggerated praise falls on the encomiast, not upon the author; whose performances are, what they pretend to be, the effusions of a man of wit; gay, vigorous, and airy."

best versificator next to Virgil, knew not how to design after him, though he had the model in his eye; that Lucan is wanting both in design and subject, and is besides too full of heat, and affec tation that amongst the moderns, Ariosto neither designed justly, nor observed any unity of action, or compass of time, or moderation in the vastness of his draught: his style is luxurious without majesty or decency, and his adventures without the compass of nature and possibility. Tasso, whose design was regular, and who observed the rules of unity in time and place more closely than Virgil, yet was not so happy in his action: he confesses himself to have been too lyrical, that is, to have written beneath the dignity of heroick verse, in his episodes of Sophronia, Erminia, and Armida. His story is not so pleasing as Ariosto's; he is too flatulent sometimes, and sometimes too dry; many times unequal, and almost always forced; and besides, is full of conceipts, points of epigram, and witticisms; all which are not only below the dignity of heroick verse, but contrary to its nature: Virgil and Homer have not one of them. And those who are guilty of so boyish an ambition in so grave a subject, are so far from being considered as heroick poets, that they ought to be turned down from Homer to the ANTHOLOGIA,, from Virgil to Martial and Owen's Epigrams, and from Spencer to Flecno; that is, from the top to the bottom of all poetry. But to return to Tasso: he borrows from the invention of Boiardo, and in his alteration of his poem, which is infinitely for the worse, imitates

Homer so very servilely, that (for example) he gives the King of Jerusalem fifty sons, only because Homer had bestowed the like number on King Priam; he kills the youngest in the same manner; and has provided his hero with a Patroclus, under another name, only to bring him back to the wars, when his friend was killed. The French have performed nothing in this kind, which is not far below those two Italians, and subject to a thousand more reflections, without examining their ST. LEWIS, their PUCELLE, or their ALARICK.* The English have only to boast of Spencer and Milton, who neither of them wanted either genius or learning, to have been perfect poets; and yet both of them are liable to many censures. For there is no uniformity in the design of Spencer: he aims at the accomplishment of no one action; he raises up a hero for every one of his adventures, and endows each of them with some particular moral virtue, which renders them all equal, without subordination or preference every one is most valiant in his own legend: only we must do him that justice to observe, that magnanimity, which is the character of Prince Arthur, shines throughout the whole poem; and succours the rest, when they are in distress. The original of every knight was then living in the court of Queen Elizabeth; and he attributed to each of them that virtue which he thought was most conspicuous in them: an ingenious piece of

* ST. LOUIS, ou la sainte couronne reconquisé, an heroick poem, was written by Le Moyne; LA PUCELLE by Chapelain, and ALARIQUE by Scuderi.

flattery, though it turned not much to his account. Had he lived to finish his poem, in the six remaining legends, it had certainly been more of a piece; but could not have been perfect, because the model was not true. But Prince Arthur, or his chief patron Sir Philip Sydney, whom he intended to make happy by the marriage of his Gloriana, dying before him, deprived the poet both of means and spirit to accomplish his design. For the rest, his

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• From the time this Essay was written, to the present day, this representation has been given again and again, in various books of biography and criticism; and among others, Fenton has declared himself entirely of Dryden's opinion, that, on the death of Sir Philip Sydney, "Spencer was deprived of means and spirit to accomplish his design," in consequence of which his FAERY QUEEN was left imperfect and unfinished. This notion, for which there is no ground whatsoever, (as I shall elsewhere more fully shew,) proves how very slight and superficial the inquiries were, which the poets of the last century and the beginning of the present, made concerning their predecessors; of which Rowe's Life of Shakspeare, and Hughes's Life of Spencer, as well as the present observation of Dryden, furnish abundant evidence.

Before Spencer went to Ireland with Lord Grey (1580) we learn from one of his letters to Gabriel Harvey, that the plan of THE FAERY QUEEN was formed, and some part of it composed. In a Dialogue written by his friend Lodowick Bryskett, which appears to have been composed some time between 1584 and 1589, and in which Spencer is introduced as a speaker, the poem is spoken of as then in hand. In 1589 he brought three books of it to London, which were published in 1590-91. In 1592 or 1593, he became acquainted with the lady, whom he afterwards