travagance of the design. The scene op with a chorus of angels, and a cherub thus speaks for the rest: Let the rainb be the fiddle-stick of the fiddle of the heave let the planets be the notes of our mus let time beat carefully the measure, and winds make the sharps, &c.' Thus play begins, and every scene rises above last in profusion of impertinence !

"Milton pierced through the absur of that performance to the hidden majest the subject, which, being altogether u for the stage, yet might be (for the ge of Milton, and for his only) the founda of an epic poem.

"He took from that ridiculous the first hint of the noblest work, wh human imagination has ever attempted, which he executed more than twenty y after.

"In the like manner, Pythagoras c the invention of music to the noise of hammer of a blacksmith; and thus, in days, Sir Isaac Newton, walking in his den, had the first thought of his syste

gravitation upon seeing an apple falling from a tree."

It was thus that, in the year 1727, Voltaire then studying in England, and collecting all possible information concerning our great epic poet, accounted for the origin of Paradise Lost. Rolli, another foreign student, in epic poetry, who resided at that time in London, and was engaged in translating Milton into Italian verse, published some severe censures, in English, on the English essay of Voltaire, to vindicate both Tasso and Milton from certain strictures of sarcastic raillery, which the volatile Frenchman had lavished upon both. Voltaire, indeed, has fallen himself into the very inconsistency, which he mentions as unaccountable in Dryden; I mean the inconsistency of sometimes praising Milton with such admiration as approaches to idolatry, and sometimes reproving him with such keenness of ridicule as borders on contempt. In the course of this discussion, we may find, perhaps, a mode of accounting for the inconsistency both of Dryden and Voltaire;

let us attend at present to what the latter has said of Andreini!-If the Adamo of this author really gave birth to the divine poem of Milton, the Italian dramatist, whatever rank he might hold in his own country, has a singular claim to our attention and regard. Johnson indeed calls the report of Voltaire a wild and unauthorized story; and Rolli asserts, in reply to it, that if Milton saw the Italian drama, it must have been at Milan, as the Adamo, in his opinion, was a performance too contemptible to be endured at Florence. "Andreini (says the critic of Italy) was a stroller (un istrione) of the worst age of the Italian letters." Notwithstanding these terms of contempt, which one of his countrymen has bestowed upon Andreini, he appears to me highly worthy of our notice; for (although in uniting, like Shakespeare and Moliere, the two different arts of writing and of acting plays, he discovered not such extraordinary powers as have justly immortalized those idols of the theatre) he was yet endowed with one quality, not only uncommon, but such as

might render him, if I may hazard the expression, the poetical parent of Milton. The quality I mean is, enthusiasm in the highest degree, not only poetical but religious. Even the preface that Andreini prefixed to his Adamo may be thought sufficient to have acted like lightning on the inflammable ideas of the English poet, and to have kindled in his mind the blaze of celestial imagination.

I am aware, that in researches like the present, every conjecture may abound in illusion; the petty circumstances, by which great minds are led to the first conception. of great designs, are so various and volatile, that nothing can be more difficult to discover: fancy in particular is of a nature so airy, that the traces of her step are hardly to be discerned; ideas are so fugitive, that if poets, in their life time, were questioned concerning the manner in which the seeds of considerable productions first arose in their mind, they might not always be able to answer the enquiry; can it then be possible to succeed in such an enquiry con

cerning a mighty genius, who has been consigned more than a century to the tomb, especially when, in the records of his life, we can find no positive evidence on the point in question? However trifling the chances it may afford of success, the investigation is assuredly worthy our pursuit; for, as an accomplished critic has said, in speaking of another poet, with his usual felicity of discernment and expression, "the enquiry cannot be void of entertainment whilst Milton is our constant theme: whatever may be the fortune of the chace, we we are sure it will lead us through pleasant prospects and a fine country."

It has been frequently remarked, that accident and genius generally conspire in the origin of great performances; and the accidents that give an impulse to fancy are often such as are hardly within the reach of conjecture. Had Ellwood himself not recorded the occurrence, who would have supposed that a few words, which fell from a simple youth in conversation, were the real source of Paradise Regained? Yet the