To invalidate the claim of the moderns, with their fragments of personification, it might, perhaps, be sufficient to call to the reader's mind that immense mass of prosopopœia, on which the ancients established the ostensible fabric of their religion. What were the divinities that filled their temples, but images of things, personifications of the powers of nature? and were not these the auxiliaries of their poets? Discriminated by characteristics so appropriate and so decisive, that no observation of succeeding ages has been able to add any thing essential, or to subtract any thing as superfluous from their insignia. At this moment, the poet and the artist subsist on their sterling properties; and the greatest of the moderns could do no more than recompose from the birth of Minerva, the charms of Pandora, and the horrors of Scylla, the origin, the beauty, and the deformities of his Sin; and if, by the superhuman flight of his fancy, he snatched the attributes and shape of Death from a region yet unexplored by former wings, the being itself had not been unknown to the ancients; it carried off Alceste, and offered battle in it's gloom to Hercules. But will it be denied, that by personifying the _act_ by which his heroes were to fall, and the _punishment_ attendant on that act, Milton has, as far as in him lay, destroyed the _credibility_ of his poem? Homer found the _abstractions_, which he mingled with the real actors of his poem, already personified; and to demand a belief in the existence of Minerva or Jupiter, subjected his reader to no greater exertion, than to believe in the existence of Achilles or Ulysses. Had credibility not been the great principle of Homer, had he introduced _Wisdom_ seizing _Achilles_ by the hair, and _Beauty_ ravishing _Paris_ from the combat, the Iliad, in what concerns the plan, would be little more than the rival of the Pilgrim's Progress.