s proper, however, to remark that Miss Aikin has committed the
error, very pardonable in a lady, of overrating Addison's classical
attainments. In one department of learning, indeed, his proficiency was
such as it is hardly possible to overrate. His knowledge of the Latin
poets, from Lucretius and Catullus down to Claudian and Prudentius, was
singularly exact and profound. He understood them thoroughly, entered
into their spirit, and had the finest and most discriminating perception
of all their peculiarities of style and melody; nay, he copied their
manner with admirable skill, and surpassed, we think, all their British
imitators who had preceded him, Buchanan and Milton alone excepted. This
is high praise; and beyond this we cannot with justice go. It is clear
that Addison's serious attention, during his residence at the
University, was almost entirely concentrated on Latin poetry, and that,
if he did not wholly neglect other provinces of ancient literature, he
vouchsafed to them only a cursory glance. He does not appear to have
attained more than an ordinary acquaintance with the political and moral
writers of Rome; nor was his own Latin prose by any means equal to his
Latin verse. His knowledge of Greek, though doubtless such as was, in
his time, thought respectable at Oxford, was evidently less than that
which many lads now carry away every year from Eton and Rugby. A minute
examination of his works, if we had time to make such an examination,
would fully bear out these remarks. We will briefly advert to a few of
the facts on which our judgment is grounded.

Great praise is due to the Notes which Addison appended to his version
of the second and third books of the Metamorphoses. Yet those notes,
while they show him to have been, in his own domain, an accomplished
scholar, show also how confined that domain was. They are rich in
apposite references to Virgil, Statius, and Claudian; but they contain
not a single illustration drawn from the Greek poets. Now, if, in the
whole compass of Latin literature, there be a passage which stands in
need of illustration drawn from the Greek poets, it is the story of
Pentheus in the third book of the Metamorphoses. Ovid was indebted for
that story to Euripides and Theocritus, both of whom he has sometimes
followed minutely. But neither to Euripides nor to Theocritus does
Addison make the faintest allusion; and we, therefore, believe that we
do not wrong him by supposing that he had