On the other hand, the “State of Innocence” contains many passages of varied and happy expression peculiar to our great poet; and the speech of Lucfier in Paradise (Act third, scene first), approaches in sublimity to his prototype in Milton, Indeed, altered as this poem was from the original, in order to accommodate it to the taste of a frivolous age, it still retained too much fancy to escape the raillery of the men of wit and fashion, more disposed to “laugh at extravagance, than to sympathise with feelings of grandeur.”  The “Companion to the Theatre” mentions an objection started by the more nice and delicate critics, against the anachronism and absurdity of Lucifer conversing about the world, its form and vicissitudes, at a time previous to its creation, or, at least, to the possibility of his knowing any thing of it.  But to this objection, which applies to the “Paradise Lost” also, it is sufficient to reply, that the measure of intelligence, competent to supernatural beings, being altogether unknown to us, leaves the poet at liberty to accommodate its extent to the purposes in which he employs them, without which poetic license, it would be in vain to introduce them.  Dryden, moved by this, and similar objections, has prefixed to the drama, “An Apology for Heroic Poetry,” and the use of what is technically called “the machinery” employed in it.

Upon the whole, it may be justly questioned, whether Dryden shewed his judgment in the choice of a subject which compelled an immediate parallel betwixt Milton and himself, upon a subject so exclusively favourable to the powers of the former.  Indeed, according to Dennis, notwithstanding Dryden’s admiration of Milton, he evinced sufficiently by this undertaking, what he himself confessed twenty years afterwards, that he was not sensible of half the extent of his excellence.  In the “Town and Country Mouse,” Mr Bayes is made to term Milton “a rough unhewen fellow;” and Dryden himself, even in the dedication to the Translation from Juvenal, a work of his advanced life, alleges, that, though he found in that poet a true sublimity, and lofty thoughts, clothed with admirable Grecisms, he did not find the elegant turn of words and expression proper to the Italian poets and to Spenser.  In the same treatise, he undertakes to excuse, but not to justify Milton, for his choice of blank verse, affirming that he possessed neither grace nor facility in rhyming.  A consciousness of the harmony of his own numbers, and a predilection for that kind of verse, in which he excelled, seemed to have encouraged him to think he could improve the “Paradise Lost.”  Baker observes but too truly, that the “State of Innocence” recals the idea reprobated by Marvell in his address to Milton: 

  Or if a work so infinite be spanned,
  Jealous I was, lest some less skilful hand,
  Such as disquiet always what is well,
  And by ill-imitating would excel,
  Might hence presume the whole creation’s day
  To change in scenes, and shew it in a play.