Note 15 — THE VISION OF CAGLIOSTRO.

It is impossible for anyone devoted to the study of "Paradise Lost," of "Comus," even of "Sampson Agonistes," and especially of "Il Pensoroso" and "L'Allegro," to doubt that their writer was carried away at times by the œstrum, or divine afflatus, although Dr Johnson discredits "these bursts of light, and involutions of darkness, these transient and involuntary excursions and retrocessions of invention."—See Lives of the Poets, vol. i. p. 188.