We will not take upon ourselves the invidious office of settling precedency between two such writers.  Each in his own department is incomparable; and each, we may remark, has wisely, or fortunately, taken a subject adapted to exhibit his peculiar talent to the greatest advantage.  The Divine Comedy is a personal narrative.  Dante is the eye-witness and ear-witness of that which he relates.  He is the very man who has heard the tormented spirits crying out for the second death, who has read the dusky characters on the portal within which there is no hope, who has hidden his face from the terrors of the Gorgon, who has fled from the hooks and the seething pitch of Barbariccia and Draghignazzo.  His own hands have grasped the shaggy sides of Lucifer.  His own feet have climbed the mountain of expiation.  His own brow has been marked by the purifying angel.  The reader would throw aside such a tale in incredulous disgust, unless it were told with the strongest air of veracity, with a sobriety even in its horrors, with the greatest precision and multiplicity in its details.  The narrative of Milton in this respect differs from that of Dante as the adventures of Amadis differ from those of Gulliver.  The author of Amadis would have made his book ridiculous if he had introduced those minute particulars which give such a charm to the work of Swift, the nautical observations, the affected delicacy about names, the official documents transcribed at full length, and all the unmeaning gossip and scandal of the court, springing out of nothing, and tending to nothing.  We are not shocked at being told that a man who lived, nobody knows when, saw many very strange sights, and we can easily abandon ourselves to the illusion of the romance.  But when Lemuel Gulliver, surgeon, resident at Rotherhithe, tells us of pigmies and giants, flying islands, and philosophizing horses, nothing but such circumstantial touches could produce for a single moment a deception on the imagination.

Of all the poets who have introduced into their works the agency of supernatural beings, Milton has succeeded best.  Here Dante decidedly yields to him; and as this is a point on which many rash and ill-considered judgments have been pronounced, we feel inclined to dwell on it a little longer.  The most fatal error which a poet can possibly commit in the management of his machinery is that of attempting to philosophize too much.  Milton has been often censured for ascribing to spirits many functions of which spirits must be incapable.  But these objections, though sanctioned by eminent names, originate, we venture to say, in profound ignorance of the art of poetry.