s wont to issue from decayed limbs."

We will not take upon ourselves the invidious office of settling
precedency between two such writers. Each in his own department is
incomparable; and each, we may remark, has wisely, or fortunately, taken
a subject adapted to exhibit his peculiar talent to the greatest
advantage. The Divine Comedy is a personal narrative. Dante is the
eye-witness and ear-witness of that which he relates. He is the very man
who has heard the tormented spirits crying out for the second death,
who has read the dusky characters on the portal within which there is no
hope, who has hidden his face from the terrors of the Gorgon, who has
fled from the hooks and the seething pitch of Barbariccia and
Draghignazzo. His own hands have grasped the shaggy sides of Lucifer.
His own feet have climbed the mountain of expiation. His own brow has
been marked by the purifying angel. The reader would throw aside such a
tale in incredulous disgust, unless it were told with the strongest air
of veracity, with a sobriety even in its horrors, with the greatest
precision and multiplicity in its details. The narrative of Milton in
this respect differs from that of Dante as the adventures of Amadis
differ from those of Gulliver. The author of Amadis would have made his
book ridiculous if he had introduced those minute particulars which give
such a charm to the work of Swift, the nautical observations, the
affected delicacy about names, the official documents transcribed at
full length, and all the unmeaning gossip and scandal of the court,
springing out of nothing, and tending to nothing. We are not shocked at
being told that a man who lived, nobody knows when, saw many very
strange sights, and we can easily abandon ourselves to the illusion of
the romance. But when Lemuel Gulliver, surgeon, resident at Rotherhithe,
tells us of pigmies and giants, flying islands, and philosophizing
horses, nothing but such circumstantial touches could produce for a
single moment a deception on the imagination.

Of all the poets who have introduced into their works the agency of
supernatural beings, Milton has succeeded best. Here Dante decidedly
yields to him; and as this is a point on which many rash and
ill-considered judgments have been pronounced, we feel inclined to dwell
on it a little longer. The most fatal error which a poet can possibly
commit in the management of his machinery is that of attempting to
philosophize too much. Milton