This is to give Notice, that the SPECTATOR has taken upon him to be Visitant of all Boarding-Schools, where young Women are educated; and designs to proceed in the said Office after the same Manner that the Visitants of Colleges do in the two famous Universities of this Land.

All Lovers who write to the SPECTATOR, are desired to forbear one Expression which is in most of the Letters to him, either out of Laziness, or want of Invention, and is true of not above two thousand Women in the whole World; viz.  She has in her all that is valuable in Woman.

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No. 315 Saturday, March 1, 1712.  Addison.

  Nec deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus
  Inciderit.

  Hor.

Horace advises a Poet to consider thoroughly the Nature and Force of his Genius. [1] Milton seems to have known perfectly well, wherein his Strength lay, and has therefore chosen a Subject entirely conformable to those Talents, of which he was Master.  As his Genius was wonderfully turned to the Sublime, his Subject is the noblest that could have entered into the Thoughts of Man.  Every thing that is truly great and astonishing, has a place in it.  The whole System of the intellectual World; the Chaos, and the Creation; Heaven, Earth and Hell; enter into the Constitution of his Poem.

Having in the First and Second Books represented the Infernal World with all its Horrors, the Thread of his Fable naturally leads him into the opposite Regions of Bliss and Glory.

If Milton’s Majesty forsakes him any where, it is in those Parts of his Poem, where the Divine Persons are introduced as Speakers.  One may, I think, observe that the Author proceeds with a kind of Fear and Trembling, whilst he describes the Sentiments of the Almighty.  He dares not give his Imagination its full Play, but chuses to confine himself to such Thoughts as are drawn from the Books of the most Orthodox Divines, and to such Expressions as may be met with in Scripture.  The Beauties, therefore, which we are to look for in these Speeches, are not of a Poetical Nature, nor so proper to fill the Mind with Sentiments of Grandeur, as with Thoughts of Devotion.  The Passions, which they are designed to raise, are a Divine Love and Religious Fear.  The Particular Beauty of the Speeches in the Third Book, consists in that Shortness and Perspicuity of Style, in which the Poet has couched the greatest Mysteries of Christianity, and drawn together, in a regular Scheme, the whole Dispensation of Providence, with respect to Man.  He has represented all the abstruse Doctrines of Predestination, Free-Will and Grace, as also the great Points of Incarnation and Redemption, (which naturally grow up in a Poem that treats of the Fall of Man) with great Energy of Expression, and in a clearer and stronger Light than I ever met with in any other Writer.  As these Points are dry in themselves to the generality of Readers, the concise and clear manner in which he has treated them, is very much to be admired, as is likewise that particular Art which he has made use of in the interspersing of all those Graces of Poetry, which the Subject was capable of receiving.