stream of Albula suggests to him several passages of Martial.  But he has not a word to say of the illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna[21] without recollecting the specter huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini without one thought of Francesca.  At Paris he had eagerly sought an introduction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that at Florence he was in the vicinity of a poet with whom Boileau could not sustain a comparison:  of the greatest lyric poet of modern times [!] Vincenzio Filicaja. . .  The truth is that Addison knew little and cared less about the literature of modern Italy.  His favorite models were Latin.  His favorite critics were French.  Half the Tuscan poetry that he had read seemed to him monstrous and the other half tawdry."[22]

There was no academy in England, but there was a critical tradition that was almost as influential.  French critical gave the law:  Boileau, Dacier, LeBossu, Rapin, Bouhours; English critics promulgated it:  Dennis, Langbaine, Rymer, Gildon, and others now little read.  Three writers of high authority in three successive generations—­Dryden, Addison, and Johnson—­consolidated a body of literary opinion which may be described, in the main, as classical, and as consenting, though with minor variations.  Thus it was agreed on all hands that it was a writer’s duty to be “correct.”  It was well indeed to be “bold,” but bold with discretion.  Dryden thought Shakspere a great poet than Jonson, but an inferior artist.  He was to be admired, but not approved.  Homer, again, it was generally conceded, was not so correct as Vergil, though he had more “fire.”  Chesterfield preferred Vergil to Homer, and both of them to Tasso.  But of all epics the one he read with most pleasure was the “Henriade.”  As for “Paradise Lost,” he could not read it through.  William Walsh, “the muses’ judge and friend,” advised the youthful Pope that “there was one way still left open for him, by which he might excel any of his predecessors, which was by correctness; that though indeed we had several great poets, we as yet could boast of none that were perfectly correct; and that therefore he advised him to make this quality his particular study.”  “The best of the moderns in all language,” he wrote to Pope, “are those that have the nearest copied the ancients.”  Pope was thankful for the counsel and mentions its giver in the “Essay on Criticism” as one who had

                “taught his muse to sing,
    Prescribed her heights and pruned her tender wing.”

But what was correct?  In the drama, e.g., the observance of the unities was almost universally recommended, but by no means universally practiced.  Johnson, himself a sturdy disciple of Dryden and Pope, exposed the fallacy of that stage illusion, on the supposed necessity of which the unities of time and place were defended.  Yet Johnson, in his own tragedy “Irene,” conformed to the rules