religious side that he first entered into the perception of its
grandeur. His sympathy with its high purpose caused him to praise, in
the same pages that commended 'Paradise Lost' to his countrymen, another
'epic,' Blackmore's 'Creation', a dull metrical treatise against
atheism, as a work which deserved to be looked upon as

'one of the most useful and noble productions of our English verse.
The reader,' he added, of a piece which shared certainly with
Salisbury Plain the charms of flatness and extent of space, 'the
reader cannot but be pleased to find the depths of philosophy
enlivened with all the charms of poetry, and to see so great a
strength of reason amidst so beautiful a redundancy of the
imagination.'

The same strong sympathy with Blackmore's purpose in it blinded Dr.
Johnson also to the failure of this poem, which is Blackmore's best.
From its religious side, then, it may be that Addison, when a student at
Oxford, first took his impressions of the poetry of Milton. At Oxford he
accepted the opinion of France on Milton's art, but honestly declared,
in spite of that, unchecked enthusiasm:

Whate'er his pen describes I more than see,
Whilst every verse, arrayed in majesty,
Bold and sublime, my whole attention draws,
And seems above the critic's nicer laws.

This chief place among English poets Addison assigned to Milton, with
his mind fresh from the influences of a father who had openly contemned
the Commonwealth, and by whom he had been trained so to regard Milton's
service of it that of this he wrote: