Berkeley congratulated him upon the display of powers more truly
poetical than he had shown before with elegance of description and
justness of precepts he had now exhibited boundless fertility of
invention. He always considered the intermixture of the machinery
with the action as his most successful exertion of poetical art.
He, indeed, could never afterwards produce anything of such
unexampled excellence. Those performances, which strike with
wonder, are combinations of skilful genius with happy casualty; and
it is not likely that any felicity, like the discovery of a new race
of preternatural agents, should happen twice to the same man. Of
this poem the author was, I think, allowed to enjoy the praise for a
long time without disturbance. Many years afterwards Dennis
published some remarks upon it with very little force and with no
effect; for the opinion of the public was already settled, and it
was no longer at the mercy of criticism.

About this time he published the "Temple of Fame," which, as he
tells Steele in their correspondence, he had written two years
before--that is, when he was only twenty-two years old, an early
time of life for so much learning and so much observation as that
work exhibits. On this poem Dennis afterwards published some
remarks, of which the most reasonable is that some of the lines
represent motion as exhibited by sculpture.

Of the Epistle from "Eloisa to Abelard," I do not know the date.
His first inclination to attempt a composition of that tender kind
arose, as Mr. Savage told me, from his perusal of Prior's "Nut-brown
Maid." How much he has surpassed Prior's work it is not necessary
to mention, when perhaps it may be said, with justice, that he has
excelled every composition of the same kind. The mixture of