[Footnote 1:  “Addison’s humour.” Undoubtedly there is much gentlemanlike humour in Addison’s Sir Roger de Coverley; but to say that he “excels all men that ever lived” in that quality is an exaggeration hardly to be understood in a man who had seen the “Rivals” and the “Critic.”  In the present day no one, it may be supposed, would echo it, after Scott with the Baron, the Antiquary, Dalgetty, &c., and Thackeray with Mrs. O’Dowd, Major Pendennis, and Colonel Newcome.  The epithet “Vafer” applied to Horace by Persius is not inapplicable to Addison.  There is a slyness about some of his sketches which breathes something of the Horatian facetiousness.  It is remarkable that in all this long and varied criticism Walpole scarcely mentions wit, which he seems to allow to no one but Horace and Boileau.  His comparative denial of it to Aristophanes and Lucian creates a supposition that his Greek was inferior to his Latin scholarship.  It is not always easy to distinguish humour from wit; of the two, the former seems the higher quality.  Wit is verbal, conversant with language, combining keenness and terseness of expression with a keen perception of resemblances or differences; humour has, comparatively speaking, little to do with language, and is of different kinds, varying with the class of composition in which it is found.  In one of his “Imaginary Conversations” Savage Landor remarks that “It is no uncommon thing to hear, ’Such an one has humour rather than wit.’  Here the expression can only mean pleasantry, for whoever has humour has wit, although it does not follow that whoever has wit has humour....  The French have little humour, because they have little character; they excel all nations in wit, because of their levity and sharpness.”]

The Grecians had grace in everything; in poetry, in oratory, in statuary, in architecture, and probably, in music and painting.  The Romans, it is true, were their imitators; but, having grace too, imparted it to their copies, which gave them a merit that almost raises them to the rank of originals.  Horace’s “Odes” acquired their fame, no doubt, from the graces of his manner and purity of his style—­the chief praise of Tibullus and Propertius, who certainly cannot boast of more meaning than Horace’s “Odes.”

Waller, whom you proscribe, Sir, owed his reputation to the graces of his manner, though he frequently stumbled, and even fell flat; but a few of his smaller pieces are as graceful as possible:  one might say that he excelled in painting ladies in enamel, but could not succeed in portraits in oil, large as life.  Milton had such superior merit, that I will only say, that if his angels, his Satan, and his Adam have as much dignity as the Apollo Belvedere, his Eve has all the delicacy and graces of the Venus of Medicis; as his description of Eden has the colouring of Albano.  Milton’s tenderness imprints ideas as graceful as Guido’s Madonnas:  and the “Allegro,” “Penseroso,” and “Comus” might be denominated from the three Graces; as the Italians gave similar titles to two or three of Petrarch’s best sonnets.