of the best it can only be said, that they are not bad; and perhaps
only the eighth and twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender
commendation. The fabric of a sonnet, however adapted to the
Italian language, has never succeeded in ours, which, having greater
variety of termination, requires the rhymes to be often changed.

Those little pieces may be despatched without much anxiety; a
greater work calls for greater care. I am now to examine "Paradise
Lost;" a poem which, considered with respect to design, may claim
the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among
the productions of the human mind.

By the general consent of critics the first praise of genius is due
to the writer of an epic poem, as it requires an assemblage of all
the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions.
Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling
imagination to the help of reason. Epic poetry undertakes to teach
the most important truths by the most pleasing precepts, and
therefore relates some great event in the most affecting manner.
History must supply the writer with the rudiments of narration,
which he must improve and exalt by a nobler art, must animate by
dramatic energy, and diversify by retrospection and anticipation;
morality must teach him the exact bounds, and different shades, of
vice and virtue; from policy, and the practice of life, he has to
learn the discriminations of character, and the tendency of the
passions, either single or combined; and physiology must supply him
with illustrations and images. To put those materials to poetical
use, is required an imagination capable of painting nature and
realising fiction. Nor is he yet a poet till he has attained the
whole extension of his language, distinguished all the delicacies of