it, tho' I cannot account for it" (I. 339). It is to the text the Preface lays the foundation for this kind of response in its emphasis on the emotive range of Virgil--on his power to burn and to freeze, to raise admiration, terror, and pity. "The _Greek_ Poet knew little of the Passions, in comparison of the _Roman_" his argument runs, setting Virgil on the peak of Parnassus. This enthusiastic excitement is firmly controlled in the Preface by the disciplines of more formal criticism, and here, inevitably, Trapp follows the same kind of standard authorities as Dryden in his translation. It would be untypical of the man not to give positive guarantees of his learning and respectability. He shows that he had absorbed the arguments of René le Bossu's _Traité du Poème Epique_ (1675) and knows Jean Regnauld de Segrais' translation of the _Aeneid_ (1668). He was familiar with René Rapin's _Réflexions sur la Poétique d'Aristote_ (1674) and André Dacier's _La Poétique d'Aristote Traduite en Français. Avec des Remarques_ (1692). The name of J. C. Scaliger intrudes, if only to be mentioned with distaste; for the pedantic querulousness of Scaliger's extended comparison of Homer with Virgil attracted Trapp no more than it did Addison, both critics, in the English humanistic tradition, being more concerned with an appreciative and elegant brevity than with exhaustive scholarship. It was necessary also to show some knowledge of the quarrel of the ancients and moderns; but Trapp is concerned with the integrity of European culture, not with the inane counting of points for or against past or present and not at all with scoring off personal antagonists. In comparison, he makes Swift, who always sneered at him, and even Pope seem sometimes trivial and bitchy.