That Tasso, Ariosto, and Camoens, the three most celebrated of modern Epic Poets, are infinitely excelled in propriety of design, of sentiment, and style, by Horace and Virgil, it would be serious trifling to attempt to prove:  but Milton, perhaps, will not so easily resign his claim to equality, if not to superiority.  Let it, however, be remembered, that if Milton be enabled to dispute the prize with the great champions of antiquity, it is entirely owing to the sublime conceptions he has copied from the book of God.  These, therefore, must be taken away before we begin to make a just estimate of his genius; and from what remains, it cannot, I presume, be said with candour and impartiality, that he has excelled Homer in the sublimity and variety of his thoughts, or the strength and majesty of his diction.

Shakespear, Corneille, and Racine, are the only modern writers of Tragedy, that we can venture to oppose to Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.  The first is an author so uncommon and eccentric, that we can scarcely try him by dramatic rules.  In strokes of nature and character, he yields not to the Greeks:  in all other circumstances that constitute the excellence of the drama, he is vastly inferior.  Of the three moderns, the most faultless is the tender and exact Racine:  but he was ever ready to acknowledge, that his capital beauties were borrowed from his favourite Euripides; which, indeed, cannot escape the observation of those who read with attention his Phaedra and Andromache.  The pompous and truly Roman sentiments of Corneille are chiefly drawn from Luoan and Tacitus; the former of whom, by a strange perversion of taste, he is known to have preferred to Virgil.  His diction is not so pure and mellifluous, his characters not so various and just, nor his plots so regular, so interesting, and simple, as those of his pathetic rival.  It is by this simplicity of fable alone, when every single act, and scene, and speech, and sentiment, and word, concur to accelerate the intended event, that the Greek tragedies kept the attention of the audience immoveably fixed upon one principal object, which must be necessarily lessened, and the ends of the drama defeated, by the mazes and intricacies of modern plots.

The assertion of Addison with respect to the first particular, regarding the higher kinds of poetry, will remain unquestionably true, till nature in some distant age, for in the present, enervated with luxury, she seems incapable of such an effort, shall produce some transcendent genius, of power to eclipse the Iliad and the Edipus.

The superiority of the ancient artists in Painting, is not perhaps so clearly manifest.  They were ignorant, it will be said, of light, of shade, and perspective; and they had not the use of oil colours, which are happily calculated to blend and unite without harshness and discordance, to give a boldness and relief to the figures, and to form those middle Teints which render every well-wrought piece a closer resemblance