There is no arriving at Perfection but by these Rules, and they certainly go astray that take a different course....  And if a Poem made by these Rules fails of success, the fault lies not in the Art, but in the Artist; all who have writ of this Art, have followed no other Idea but that of Aristotle.

Again as to Style,

  to say the truth, what is good on this subject is all taken from
  Aristotle, who is the only source whence good sense is to be drawn,
  when one goes about to write.

This was the critical temper Addison resolved to meet on its own ground and do battle with for the honour of that greatest of all Epic Poets to whom he fearlessly said that all the Greeks and Latins must give place.  In so doing he might suggest here and there cautiously, and without bringing upon himself the discredit of much heresy,—­indeed, without being much of a heretic,—­that even the Divine Aristotle sometimes fell short of perfection.  The conventional critics who believed they kept the gates of Fame would neither understand nor credit him.  Nine years after these papers appeared, Charles Gildon, who passed for a critic of considerable mark, edited with copious annotation as the Laws of Poetry (1721), the Duke of Buckingham’s Essay on Poetry, Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse, and Lord Lansdowne on Unnatural Flights in Poetry, and in the course of comment Gildon said that

Mr. Addison in the Spectators, in his criticisms upon Milton, seems to have mistaken the matter, in endeavouring to bring that poem to the rules of the epopoeia, which cannot be done ...  It is not an Heroic Poem, but a Divine one, and indeed of a new species.  It is plain that the proposition of all the heroic poems of the ancients mentions some one person as the subject of their poem...  But Milton begins his poem of things, and not of men.

The Gildon are all gone; and when, in the next generation after theirs, national life began, in many parts of Europe, strongly to assert itself in literature against the pedantry of the French critical lawgivers, in Germany Milton’s name was inscribed on the foremost standard of the men who represented the new spirit of the age.  Gottsched, who dealt French critical law from Leipzig, by passing sentence against Milton in his Art of Poetry in 1737, raised in Bodmer an opponent who led the revolt of all that was most vigorous in German thought, and put an end to French supremacy.  Bodmer, in a book published in 1740 Vom Wunderbaren in der Poesie, justified and exalted Milton, and brought Addison to his aid by appending to his own work a translation of these Milton papers out of the Spectator.  Gottsched replied; Bodmer retorted.  Bodmer translated Paradise Lost; and what was called the English or Milton party (but was, in that form, really a German national party) were at last left masters of the field.  It was right that these