and most correct poet we ever had." Long before Addison wrote the papers on _Paradise Lost_ in the _Spectator_, Milton had received full recognition in the literary handbooks of that age. Langbaine, in his _Account of the English Dramatick Poets_ (1691), takes notice of Dryden's debts to _Samson Agonistes_, and, with an effort to be just, remarks of Milton:--" Had his Principles been as good as his Parts, he had been an Excellent Person." Sir Thomas Pope Blount, in his _De Re Poetica_ (1694), and Bysshe in his _Art of English Poetry_ (1702), bear witness, in their several ways, to Milton's great and assured fame. Indeed, Thomas Rymer, of Gray's Inn, Esquire, who in 1677 had sneered at "that Paradise Lost of Milton's which some are pleased to call a Poem," and William Winstanley, who, in the _Lives of the Most Famous English Poets_ (1687), had remarked of Milton that "his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a Snuff, and his Memory will always stink," were almost alone among the voices of their time. They were still under the influence of the old political prejudice, but they did battle for a doomed opinion, and, among judges not illiterate, they are the poet's last detractors. The singular thing to note is that the eighteenth century, which broke with almost every other seventeenth-century poet before Dryden, did not break with Milton. "Who now reads Cowley?" Pope asked: Cowley, whose works ran through so many editions that no modern reprint has been called for. If he had asked, "Who now reads Milton?" the answer must have been, "Every writer of English verse"; and so it has continued from the time of Milton's death to the present day. The choice of blank verse for _Paradise Lost_ established that metre in formidable rivalry to the heroic couplet, so that it became the usual metre for long poems of a reflective or descriptive cast. Professed imitations of Milton's verse were many; among them, Addison's _Translation of a Story out of the Third Aeneid_, Broome's experiment in the translation of the Eleventh Odyssey, Fenton's fragments of two books of the _Iliad_, and Christopher Pitt's paraphrase of Psalm cxxxix. In the first year of the eighteenth century John Philips showed, in his _Splendid Shilling_, how the style of Milton might be applied, for the purposes of burlesque, to humble subjects, a lesson which he further illustrated, with no ostensible comic intent, in his later poems, _Cyder_ and _Blenheim_. Gay, in _Wine, a Poem_, Somerville in _The Chase_, Armstrong in _The Oeconomy of Love_ and _The Art of Preserving Health_, Christopher Smart in The Hop-Garden, Dyer in _The Fleece_, and Grainger in _The Sugar-Cane_, all followed where Philips' _Cyder_ had led, and multiplied year by year what may be called the technical and industrial applications of Milton's style. Among the many other blank verse poems produced during the middle part of the century it is enough to name Thomson's _Seasons_; Blair's _Grave_;