I should be enamored of the spirit of the English
nation, did it not utterly frustrate the good effects it would produce
by passion and the spirit of party."
Candide, seeing a Milton, asked the senator if he did not think that
author a great man.
"Who?" said Pococurante sharply; "that barbarian who writes a
tedious commentary in ten books of rumbling verse, on the first
chapter of Genesis? that slovenly imitator of the Greeks, who
disfigures the creation, by making the Messiah take a pair of
compasses from Heaven's armory to plan the world; whereas Moses
represented the Diety as producing the whole universe by his fiat? Can
I think you have any esteem for a writer who has spoiled Tasso's
Hell and the Devil; who transforms Lucifer sometimes into a toad,
and at others into a pygmy; who makes him say the same thing over
again a hundred times; who metamorphoses him into a school-divine; and
who, by an absurdly serious imitation of Ariosto's comic invention
of firearms, represents the devils and angels cannonading each other
in Heaven? Neither I nor any other Italian can possibly take
pleasure in such melancholy reveries; but the marriage of Sin and
Death, and snakes issuing from the womb of the former, are enough to
make any person sick that is not lost to all sense of delicacy.
Pages:
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138