essays here reproduced, which with a few exceptions were in accord with
the prevailing current. _The Life of Our Blessed Lord_ shows strongly
the influence of Cowley's _Davideis_. Wesley's great admiration
persisted after the tide had turned away from Cowley; and his liking for
the "divine Herbert" and for Crashaw represented the tastes of sober and
unfashionable readers. In spite of the fact that he professed unbounded
admiration for Homer as the greatest genius in nature, in practise he
seemed more inclined to follow the lead of Cowley, Virgil, and Vida.
Although there was much in Ariosto that he enjoyed, he preferred Tasso;
the irregularities in both, however, he felt bound to deplore. To
Spenser's _Faerie Queene_ he allowed extraordinary merit. If the plan
of it was noble, he thought, and the mark of a comprehensive genius, yet
the action of the poem seemed confused. Nevertheless, like Prior later,
Wesley was inclined to suspend judgment on this point because the poem had
been left incomplete. To Spenser's "thoughts" he paid the highest tribute,
and to his "Expressions flowing natural and easie, with such a prodigious
Poetical Copia as never any other must expect to enjoy." Like most of the
Augustans Wesley did not care greatly for _Paradise Regained_, but he
partly atoned by his praise for _Paradise Lost_, which was an
"original" and therefore "above the common Rules." Though defective in its
action, it was resplendent with sublime thoughts perhaps superior to any
in Virgil or Homer, and full of incomparable and exquisitely moving
passages. In spite of his belief that Milton's blank verse was a mistake,
making for looseness and incorrectness, he borrowed lines and images from
it, and in Bk. IV of _The Life of Our Blessed Lord_ he incorporated a
whole passage of Milton's blank verse in the midst of his heroic couplets.

Wesley's attitude toward Dryden deserves a moment's pause. In the "Essay
on Heroic Poetry" he observed that a speech of Satan's in _Paradise
Lost_ is nearly equalled in Dryden's _State of Innocence_. Later