Note 155 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS;

Lee introduces Alexander the Great, saying,

“When Glory, like the dazzling eagle, stood Perch’d on my beaver in the Granic flood, When Fortune’s self my standard trembling bore, And the pale Fates stood frighted on the shore; When the Immortals on the billows rode, And I myself appear’d the leading god!”

In the province of taste Warburton was always at sea without chart or compass, and was as unlucky in his panegyric on Milton as on Lee. He calls the “Paradise Regained” “a charming poem, nothing inferior in the poetry and the sentiments to the Paradise Lost.” Such extravagance could only have proceeded from a critic too little sensible to the essential requisites of poetry itself.