To copy nature is to copy them."

Thus Vergil when he started to compose the Aeneid may have seemed above
the critic's law, but when he came to study Homer, he found that Nature
and Homer were the same. Accordingly,

"he checks the bold design,
And rules as strict his labor'd work confine."

Not to stimulate, but to check, to confine, to regulate, is the unfailing
precept of this whole critical school. Literature, in the state in which
they found it, appeared to them to need the curb more than the spur.

Addison's scholarship was almost exclusively Latin, though it was
Vergilian rather than Horatian. Macaulay[20] says of Addison's "Remarks
on Italy"; "To the best of our remembrance, Addison does not mention
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bolardo, Berni, Lorenzo de' Medici, or
Machiavelli. He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of
Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso.
But for Tasso and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flaccus and
Sidonius Apollinaris. The gentle flow of the Ticino brings a line of
Silius to his mind. The sulphurous stream of Albula suggests to him
several passages of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the
illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna[21]
without recollecting the specter huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini
without one thought of Francesca. At Paris he had eagerly sought an
introduction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that
at Florence he was in the vicinity of a poet with whom Boileau could not
sustain a comparison: of the greatest lyric poet of modern times [!]
Vincenzio Filicaja. . . The truth is that Addison knew little and cared