It is noticeable, however, that in his Account of the Greatest English Poets, young Addison gave a fifth part of the piece to expression of the admiration he felt even then for Milton.  That his appreciation became critical, and, although limited, based on a sense of poetry which brought him near to Milton, Addison proved in the ‘Spectator’ by his eighteen Saturday papers upon ‘Paradise Lost’.  But it was from the 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: 

  Oh, had the Poet ne’er profaned his pen,
  To varnish o’er the guilt of faithless men;
  His other works might have deserved applause
  But now the language can’t support the cause,
  While the clean current, tho’ serene and bright,
  Betrays a bottom odious to the sight.

If we turn now to the verse written by Steele in his young Oxford days, and within twelve months of the date of Addison’s lines upon English poets, we have what Steele called ‘The Procession.’  It is the procession of those who followed to the grave the good Queen Mary, dead of small-pox, at the age of 32.  Steele shared his friend Addison’s delight in Milton, and had not, indeed, got beyond the sixth number of the ‘Tatler’ before he compared the natural beauty and innocence of Milton’s Adam and Eve with Dryden’s treatment of their love.  But the one man for whom Steele felt most enthusiasm was not to be sought through books, he was a living moulder of the future of the nation.  Eagerly intent upon King William, the hero of the Revolution that secured our liberties, the young patriot found in him also the hero of his verse.  Keen sense of the realities about him into which Steele had been born, spoke through the very first lines of this poem: