allegorical characters, contrary to the practice of the ancients? Does
the poet intrude personally into his poem, thus mixing the lyric and epic
styles? etc. Not a word as to Milton's puritanism, or his
_Weltanschauung_, or the relation of his work to its environment.
Nothing of that historical and sympathetic method--that endeavor to put
the reader at the poet's point of view--by which modern critics, from
Lessing to Sainte-Beuve, have revolutionized their art. Addison looks at
"Paradise Lost" as something quite distinct from Milton: as a
manufactured article to be tested by comparing it with standard fabrics
by recognized makers, like the authors of the Iliad and Aeneid.

When the Queen Anne poetry took a serious turn, the generalizing spirit
of the age led it almost always into the paths of ethical and didactic
verse. "It stooped to truth and moralized its song," finding its
favorite occupation in the sententious expression of platitudes--the
epigram in satire, the maxim in serious work. It became a poetry of
aphorisms, instruction us with Pope that

"Virtue alone is happiness below;"

or, with Young, that

"Procrastination is the thief of time;"

or, with Johnson, that

"Slow rises worth by poverty depressed."

When it attempted to deal concretely with the passions, it found itself
impotent. Pope's "Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard" rings hollow: it is