the cornices which they supposed were measured inch by inch
with the utmost nicety. Ingenious devices were invented for enabling the
artificer to reproduce, by a series of complicated curves, the profile of
a Doric capital, which probably owed its form to the steady hand and
uncontrolled taste of the designer. To put faith in many of the theories
propounded by architectural authorities in the last century, would be to
believe that some of the grandest monuments which the world has ever seen
raised, owe their chief beauty to an accurate knowledge of arithmetic.
The diameter of the column was divided into modules: the modules were
divided into minutes; the minutes into fractions of themselves. A
certain height was allotted to the shaft, another to the entablature. . .
Sometimes the learned discussed how far apart the columns of a portico
might be."[29]

This kind of mensuration reminds one of the disputes between French
critics as to whether the unity of time meant thirty hours, or
twenty-four, or twelve, or the actual time that it took to act the play;
or of the geometric method of the "Saturday papers" in the _Spectator_.
Addison tries "Paradise Lost" by Aristotle's rules for the composition of
an epic. Is it the narrative of a single great action? Does it begin
_in medias res_, as is proper, or _ab ovo Ledae_, as Horace has said that
an epic ought not? Does it bring in the introductory matter by way of
episode, after the approved recipe of Homer and Vergil? Has it
allegorical characters, contrary to the practice of the ancients? Does
the poet intrude personally into his poem, thus mixing the lyric and epic
styles? etc. Not a word as to Milton's puritanism, or his
_Weltanschauung_, or the relation of his work to its environment.
Nothing of that historical and sympathetic method--that endeavor to put
the reader at the poet's point of view--by which modern critics, from
Lessing to Sainte-Beuve, have revolutionized their art. Addison looks at
"Paradise Lost" as something quite distinct from Milton: as a
manufactured article to be tested by comparing it with standard fabrics
by recognized makers, like the authors of the Iliad and Aeneid.

When the Queen Anne poetry took a serious turn, the generalizing spirit
of the age led it almost always into the paths of ethical and didactic
verse. "It stooped to truth and moralized its song," finding its
favorite occupation in the sententious expression of platitudes--the
e