is for heroic poetry. Upon this account, justice to the manes of the divine poets requires, that we should acknowledge their pre-eminence upon the whole, after having thus set their inferiors upon a level with them in particular parts.

You see this general method is here applied to a few, the greater names of poetry in most polite languages. I have avoided to bring in any living authors, because I know the vanity and emulation of the poetical tribe ; which I mention, lest the reader may find fault with me for omitting Voltaire, Metastasio, or any favourite author of our own nation.

Sophocles, Euripides, Corneille, Racine.

Dante, Ariosto, Spenser, Milton.

Homer.

Tasso.

Terence, Horace.

Pindar, Virgil.

DRAMATIC EXPRESSION.

* The reader is requested to observe, that each poet is placed in the following suinmaries, according to the only order the author's arrangement admits of, viz. a chronological

one.

Shakspeare.

Euripides, Pindar, Lucretius, Virgil, Dante,

Pindar, Terence, Lucretius, Horaće, Spenser,

Boileau, Racine.

Homer, Sophocles, Corneille, Pope.

Ariosto.

Euripides.

Dante and Tasso.

Shakspeare.

COLOURING.

Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, and Terence are not num

* He

pays a fine compliment to Milton in his Ode to the

EARL OF HUNTingdon.

"Mark, how the dread Pantheon stands,

Amid the domes of modern hands:

Fifth

Sixth

Corneille, Spenser.

Pindar, Sophocles, Horace, Dante, Ariosto,

Racine, Pope.

Euripides, Tasso*, Boileau.

Then turn, and, while each western clime
Presents her tuneful sons to TIME,

So mark thou MILTON's name;

And add, Thus differs from the throng
The spirit, which informed thy awful song,

Which bade thy potent voice protect thy country's fame†.”

This low appreciation of Tasso corresponds with a passage. in the second book of his poem on the Imagination:

"Thus from their guardians torn, the tender arts
Of mimic fancy and harmonious joy,
To priestly domination and the lust
Of lawless courts, their amiable toil,
For three inglorious ages, have resign'd
In vain reluctant: and Torquato's tongue
Was tuned for slavish pecans at the throne
Of tinsel pomp."

"A lucky word," says Bishop Hurd, in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance, "which sounds well, and every body. gets by heart, goes farther than a volume of just criticism. In short, the exact, but cold, Boileau happened to say some

+ Alluding to the defence of the people of England against Salmasius.