the fantasticalness of the life with which they are poetically connected--
it throws me into such convulsions of rage, that I move to the window, and
(without thinking what I am about) throwing it up, calling, '_Police!
police!_' What's _that_ for? What can the police do in the business? Why,
certainly nothing. What I meant in my dream was, perhaps [but one forgets
_what_ one meant upon recovering one's temper], that the police should
take Strephon and Corydon into custody, whom I fancied at the other end of
the room. And really the justifiable fury, that arises upon recalling such
abominable attempts at bucolic sentiments in such abominable language,
sometimes transports me into a luxurious vision sinking back through one
hundred and thirty years, in which I see Addison, Phillips, both John and
Ambrose, Tickell, Fickell, Budgell, and Cudgell, with many others beside,
all cudgelled in a round robin, none claiming precedency of another, none
able to shrink from his own dividend, until a voice seems to recall me to
milder thoughts by saying, 'But surely, my friend, you never could wish to
see Addison cudgelled? Let Strephon and Corydon be cudgelled without end,
if the police can show any warrant for doing it But Addison was a man of
great genius.' True, he was so. I recollect it suddenly, and will back out
of any angry things that I have been misled into saying by Schlosser, who,
by-the-bye, was right, after all, for a wonder.

But now I will turn my whole fury in vengeance upon Schlosser. And,
looking round for a stone to throw at him, I observe this. Addison could
not be so entirely careless of exciting the public to think and feel, as
Schlosser pretends, when he took so much pains to inoculate that public
with a sense of the Miltonic grandeur. The 'Paradise Lost' had then been
published barely forty years, which was nothing in an age without reviews;
the editions were still scanty; and though no Addison could eventually
promote, for the instant he quickened, the circulation. If I recollect,
Tonson's accurate revision of the text followed immediately upon Addison's