of the neoclassical mind. It is the natural complement to his earlier translation of the Aeneid into Miltonic blank verse as well as his attempt to judge the classic sublime by the achievement of the masterwork of Christian epic, a task that had preoccupied him as Oxford's Professor of Poetry.

The importance of Trapp's Preface to his version of the Aeneid (and the extensive notes to the text) lies fundamentally in the fusion of Miltonic example with neoclassical precept in an attempt both to understand the Latin text rationally and to communicate the intensely exciting and moving experience that the Aeneid evokes. This was a new departure. French Aristotelian criticism of classical epic was (inevitably) not influenced by Milton. In the English tradition, neither Dryden in his Dedication of the Aeneid nor Pope in the prefatory material to the Iliad (with which Trapp frequently takes issue) used Paradise Lost as the basic touchstone of value. Trapp was to be sneered at in Delany's "News from Parnassus" for claiming in Pythagorean vein that the spirit of Milton had descended to him. This was unfair; he made no such claim. Trapp was trying to discover affinities between past and present in poetic sensibility and in the use of language. In doing so, he sought to place a major English poet in relation to Virgil, and he judged from this example that the English blank verse line had more of the grandeur of the Latin hexameter than the couplet in the hands even of Dryden or Pope. His taste told him that the imaginative invention and force of Milton had more of the Virgilian spirit than the elegant correctness of English Augustanism. He argues his position with vigor in the Preface and in his notes, and often with illustrative example.

The conventional view that Trapp wished to change by the interpolation of Milton was that, whereas Virgil merited the laurel for judgment and decorum, Homer possessed greater "fire," "sublimity," "fecundity," "majesty," and "vastness" (to use Trapp's terms). Homer was praised as the great original and inventor; Virgil followed in his steps with more refinement and rationality, showing everywhere that good sense and polished concision of expression characteristic of the Augustan age (so, for instance, René Rapin claimed in the well-known Comparaison).[3] One blossomed with the wild abundance and grandeur of nature; the other displayed that cultivated order shown in fields and gardens. Trapp accepts all that was granted to the Roman poet, but he claims for Virgil, Homeric qualities also: his borrowings are merely the basis for his invention (witness the tale of Dido); and as for the fire of sublimity, Trapp, like a critical Prometheus, filches that also. Among the many instances of the Virgilian fire given in the Preface, he cites "the Arrival of Aeneas with his Fleet and Forces" in the tenth book. His translation runs thus:

Amaz'd stood Turnus, and th' Ausonian Chiefs;
'Till, looking back, they saw the Navy move
Cov'ring the Sea, and gliding make to Shore.
Fierce burns his Helm; and from his tow'ring Crest
Flame flashes; and his Shield's round Bossy Gold
Vomits vast Fires: As when in gloomy Night
Ensanguin'd Comets shoot a dismal Glare;
Or the red Dog-Star, rising on the World,
To wretched Mortals threatens Dearth, and Plagues,
With Baleful Light; and saddens all the Sky.(360 ff.)

Trapp does not play the trite old game of setting the texts of Homer and Virgil in comparison, but what comes to his mind at once in his note, and rightly, given the language of his translation, is Milton describing Satan:

Like a Comet burn'd,
That fires the Length of Ophiucus huge
In th' Artick Sky; and from his horrid hair
Shakes Pestilence and War.(II. 708-711)

Similarly, when Aeneas hastens to meet Turnus in the twelfth book, Miltonic translation and Miltonic original are brought together to show the similarity between Virgilian and Christian sublime:

Aeneas ... with Joy
Exults; and thunders terrible in Arms.
As great as Athos, or as Eryx great,
Or Father Apennine, when crown'd with Okes
He waves the ruffled Forest on his Brow,
And rears his snowy Summit to the Clouds.(902 ff.)

On th' other Side Satan allarm'd
Collecting all his Might, dilated stood;
Like Teneriff, or Atlas unremov'd:
His Stature reach'd the Sky, and on his Crest
Sat Horrour plum'd.(IV. 985-989)

In the light of such illustration, it is not surprising that Trapp, in the Preface, when he wishes to give the feel of the Virgilian sublime, quotes Milton's description of the creation:

Let there be Light, said God; and forthwith Light
Ethereal, first of Things, Quintessence pure,
Sprang from the Deep.(p. xxx)

When he wants to show what grandeur with propriety the English language can achieve (even in the teeth of Dryden's rendering of Virgil, which he pertinently censures), he chooses his prime examples from Milton: witness the account of Satan "Hurl'd headlong, flaming from th' ethereal Sky...." It was a bold undertaking by Trapp, for Pope's version of Homer, elegantly correct in couplets, was in the press. Many a man was to suffer more in The Dunciad for less.[4]

Trapp's immediate critical associates in England clearly are John Dennis and Joseph Addison, and the origins of Trapp's thinking in classical antiquity may be found in Longinus. Dennis had united Milton with the poets of antiquity as an example of the passionate effects of the religious sublime,[5] while Addison (who had already translated a fragment of Aeneid III into blank verse) in his Spectator papers on Paradise Lost had tastefully combined the structural formalism of Aristotelian criticism of the epic with enthusiastic comment on the grandeur and beauty of Milton's verse. To these must be added Trapp's favorite, Roscommon, who in An Essay on Translated Verse (1685)[6] had interposed an imitation of Milton to illustrate how English verses might rise to Roman greatness. But it would be unfair to Trapp merely to reduce him to a series of component sources. He adopts and adapts; and as far as the