ure is to copy them."

Thus Vergil when he started to compose the Aeneid may have seemed above
the critic's law, but when he came to study Homer, he found that Nature
and Homer were the same. Accordingly,

"he checks the bold design,
And rules as strict his labor'd work confine."

Not to stimulate, but to check, to confine, to regulate, is the unfailing
precept of this whole critical school. Literature, in the state in which
they found it, appeared to them to need the curb more than the spur.

Addison's scholarship was almost exclusively Latin, though it was
Vergilian rather than Horatian. Macaulay[20] says of Addison's "Remarks
on Italy"; "To the best of our remembrance, Addison does not mention
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Bolardo, Berni, Lorenzo de' Medici, or
Machiavelli. He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of
Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso.
But for Tasso and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flaccus and
Sidonius Apollinaris. The gentle flow of the Ticino brings a line of
Silius to his mind. The sulphurous stream of Albula suggests to him
several passages of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the
illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna[21]
without recollecting the specter huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini
without one thought of Francesca. At Paris he had eagerly sought an
introduction to Boileau; but he seems not to have been at all aware that
at Florence he was in the vicinity of a poet with whom Boileau could not
sustain a comparison: of the greatest lyric poet of modern times [!]
Vincenzio Filicaja. . . The truth is that Addison knew little and cared
less about the literature of modern Italy. His favorite models were
Latin. His favorite critics were French. Half the Tuscan poetry that he
had read seemed to him monstrous and the other half tawdry."[22]

There was no academy in England, but there was a critical tradition that
was almost as influential. French critical gave the law: Boileau,
Dacier, LeBossu, Rapin, Bouhours; English critics promulgated it: Dennis,
Langbaine, Rymer, Gildon, and others now little read. Three writers of
high authority in three successive generations--Dryden, Addison, and
Johnson--consolidated a body of literary opinion which may be described,
in the main, as classical, and as consenting, though with minor
variations. Thus it was agreed on all han