That nice Critick Dionysius of Halicarnassus confesses, that he could not find those great Strokes, which he calls the terrible Graces, in any of the Historians, which he frequently met with in Homer.  I believe, the Success would be the same likewise, if we sought for them in any other of our Authors besides our British HOMER, Shakespeare.  This Description of the Condition of Conspirators has a Pomp and Terror in it, that perfectly astonishes.  Our excellent Mr. Addison, whose Modesty made him sometimes diffident in his own Genius, but whose exquisite Judgment always led him to the safest Guides, as we may see by those many fine Strokes in his Cato borrow’d from the Philippics of Cicero, has paraphrased this fine Description; but we are no longer to expect those terrible Graces, which he could not hinder from evaporating in the Transfusion.

  O think, what anxious Moments pass between
  The Birth of Plots, and their last fatal Periods. 
  Oh, ’tis a dreadful Interval of Time,
  Fill’d up with Horror all, and big with Death.

I shall observe two Things on this fine Imitation:  first, that the
Subjects of these two Conspiracies being so very different, (the
Fortunes of Caesar and the Roman Empire being concern’d in the
First; and That of only a few Auxiliary Troops, in the other;)
Mr. Addison could not with Propriety bring in that magnificent
Circumstance, which gives the terrible Grace to Shakespeare’s
Description.

  The Genius and the mortal Instruments
  Are then in Council.——­

For Kingdoms, in the poetical Theology, besides their good, have their evil Genius’s likewise:  represented here with the most daring Stretch of Fancy, as fitting in Council with the Conspirators, whom he calls the mortal Instruments.  But this Would have been too great an Apparatus to the Rape, and Desertion, of Syphax, and Sempronius.  Secondly, The other Thing very observable is, that Mr. Addison was so warm’d and affected with the Fire of Shakespeare’s Description; that, instead of copying his Author’s Sentiments, he has, before he was aware, given us only the Image of his own Impressions on the reading his great Original.  For,

  Oh, ’tis a dreadful Interval of Time,
  Fill’d up with Horror all, and big with Death;

are but the Affections raised by such forcible Images as these;

——­All the Int’rim is Like a Phantasma, or a hideous Dream. ——­the State of Man, Like to a little Kingdom, suffers then The Nature of an Insurrection.

Comparing the Mind of a Conspirator to an Anarchy, is just and beautiful; but the Interim to a hideous Dream has something in it so wonderfully natural, and lays the human Soul so open, that one cannot but be surpriz’d, that any Poet, who had not himself been, some time or other, engaged in a Conspiracy, could ever have given such Force of Colouring to Truth and Nature.