“As for Mr. Milton, whom we all admire with so much Justice, his Subject, is not that of an Heroick Poem, properly so call’d:  His Design is the Losing of our Happiness; his Event is not prosperous, like that of all other Epique Works” (Dryden’s French spelling of the word Epic is suggestive.  For this new critical Mode was one of the fashions that had been imported from Paris); “His Heavenly Machines are many, and his Human Persons are but two.  But I will not take Mr. Rymer’s work out of his Hands:  He has promised the World a Critique on that Author; wherein, tho he will not allow his Poem for Heroick, I hope he will grant us, that his Thoughts are elevated, his Words sounding, and that no Man has so happily copy’d the manner of Homer; or so copiously translated his Grecisms and the Latin Elegancies of Virgil.  Tis true he runs into a Flat of Thought, sometimes for a Hundred Lines together, but tis when he is got into a Track of Scripture ...  Neither will I justify Milton for his Blank Verse, tho I may excuse him, by the Example of Hanabal Caro and other Italians who have used it:  For whatever Causes he alledges for the abolishing of Rhime (which I have not now the leisure to examine), his own particular Reason is plainly this, that Rhime was not his Talent; he had neither the Ease of doing it, nor the Graces of it.”

So Dryden, who appreciated Milton better than most of his critical neighbours, wrote of him in 1692.  The promise of Rymer to discuss Milton was made in 1678, when, on the last page of his little book, The Tragedies of the Last Age consider’d and examined by the Practice of the Ancients and by the Common Sense of all Ages, in a letter to Fleetwold Shepheard, Esq. (father of two ladies who contribute an occasional letter to the Spectator), he said:  “With the remaining Tragedies I shall also send you some reflections on that Paradise Lost of Milton’s, which some are pleased to call a Poem, and assert Rhime against the slender Sophistry wherewith he attaques it.”  But two years after the appearance of Dryden’s Juvenal and Persius Rymer prefixed to his translation of Rene Rapin’s Reflections on Aristotle’s Poesie some Reflections of his own on Epic Poets.  Herein he speaks under the head Epic Poetry of Chaucer, in whose time language was not capable of heroic character; or Spenser, who “wanted a true Idea, and lost himself by following an unfaithful guide, besides using a stanza which is in no wise proper for our language;” of Sir William Davenant, who, in Gondibert, “has some strokes of an extraordinary judgment,” but “is for unbeaten tracks and new ways of thinking;” “his heroes are foreigners;” of Cowley, in whose Davideis “David is the least part of the Poem,” and there is want of the “one illustrious and perfect action which properly is the subject of an Epick Poem”:  all failing through ignorance or negligence of the Fundamental Rules or Laws of Aristotle.  But he contemptuously passes over Milton without mention.  Rene Rapin, that great French oracle of whom Dryden said, in the Preface to his own conversion of Paradise Lost into an opera, that he was alone sufficient, were all other critics lost, to teach anew the Art of Writing, Rene Rapin in the work translated and introduced by Rymer, worshipped in Aristotle the one God of all orthodox critics.  Of his Laws he said,