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possesses the peculiar vivacity of this extraordinary writer, and is indeed so curious a specimen of his versatile talents, that although it has been superseded by a French composition of great extent, under the same title, it ought, I think, to have found a place in that signal monument to the name of Voltaire, the edition of his works in ninetytwo volumes.

As my reader may be gratified in seeing the English style of this celebrated foreigner, I will transcribe, without abridgment, what he says of Andreini;

"Milton, as he was travelling through Italy in his youth, saw at Florence a comedy called Adamo, writ by one Andreini, a player, and dedicated to Mary de Medicis, Queen of France. The subject of the play, was the Fall of Man; the actors, God, the devils, the angels, Adam, Eve, the Serpent, Death, and the seven mortal sins; that topic, so improper for a drama, but so suitable to the absurd genius of the Italian stage (as it was at that time) was handled in a manner entirely conformable to the ex

The scene opens

and a cherubim

travagance of the design.

with a chorus of angels,

thus speaks for the rest :- Let the rainbow be the fiddle-stick of the fiddle of the heavens! let the planets be the notes of our music! let time beat carefully the measure, and the winds make the sharps, &c.' Thus the play begins, and every scene rises above the last in profusion of impertinence!

"Milton pierced through the absurdity of that performance to the hidden majesty of the subject, which, being altogether unfit for the stage, yet might be (for the genius of Milton, and for his only) the foundation of an epic poem.

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

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

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

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