The Spectator, Volume 2. eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,123 pages of information about The Spectator, Volume 2..

The Spectator, Volume 2. eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,123 pages of information about The Spectator, Volume 2..

I shall in my next [Papers [16]] give an Account of the many particular Beauties in Milton, which would have been too long to insert under those general Heads I have already treated of, and with which I intend to conclude this Piece of Criticism.

L.

[Footnote 1:  Poetics, cap. x.  Addison got his affected word implex by reading Aristotle through the translation and notes of Andre Dacier.  Implex was the word used by the French, but the natural English translation of Aristotle’s [Greek:  haploi] and [Greek:  peplegmenoi] is into simple and complicated.]

[Footnote 2:  [Stories of Achilles, Ulysses, and AEneas.]]

[Footnote 3:  Poetics, cap. xi.]

[Footnote 4:  that]

[Footnote 5:  Dediction of the AEneid; where, after speaking of small claimants of the honours of the Epic, he says,

Spencer has a better for his “Fairy Queen” had his action been finished, or been one; and Milton if the Devil had not been his hero, instead of Adam; if the giant had not foiled the knight, and driven him out of his stronghold, to wander through the world with his lady-errant; and if there had not been more machining persons that human in his poem.]

[Footnote 6:  [or]]

[Footnote 7:  [Episode]]

[Footnote 8:  [greater]]

[Footnote 9:  Poetics, cap. xxv.  The reason he gives is that when the Poet speaks in his own person he is not then the Imitator.  Other Poets than Homer, Aristotle adds,

  ambitious to figure throughout themselves, imitate but little and
  seldom.  Homer, after a few preparatory lines, immediately introduces a
  man or woman or some other character, for all have their character.

Of Lucan, as an example of the contrary practice, Hobbes said in his Discourse concerning the Virtues of an Heroic Poem: 

  No Heroic Poem raises such admiration of the Poet, as his hath done,
  though not so great admiration of the persons he introduceth.]

[Footnote 10:  Letters to Atticus, Bk. xiii., Ep. 44.]

[Footnote 11:  Poetices, Lib. iii. cap. 25.]

[Footnote 12:  [of]]

[Footnote 13:  [which]]

[Footnote 14:  Rhetoric, iii. ch.  II, where he cites such verbal jokes as, You wish him [Greek:  persai] (i.e. to side with Persia—­to ruin him), and the saying of Isocrates concerning Athens, that its sovereignty [Greek:  archae] was to the city a beginning [Greek:  archae] of evils.  As this closes Addison’s comparison of Milton’s practice with Aristotle’s doctrine (the following papers being expressions of his personal appreciation of the several books of Paradise Lost), we may note here that Milton would have been quite ready to have his work tried by the test Addison has been applying.  In his letter to Samuel Hartlib, sketching his ideal of a good Education, he assigns to advanced pupils logic and then

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