It has been customary to speak of these literary appropriations as
'imitations '; but whoever compares them with the originals will find
that many of them are more correctly termed translations.
The case, from
a literary-moral point of view, is different as regards ancient writers,
and it is surely idle to accuse Milton, as has been done, of pilferings
from Aeschylus or Ovid. There is no such thing as robbing the classics.
They are our literary fathers, and what they have left behind them is
our common heritage; we may adapt, borrow, or steal from them as much as
will suit our purpose; to acknowledge such 'thefts' is sheer pedantry
and ostentation. But Salandra and the rest of them were Milton's
contemporaries. It is certainly an astonishing fact that no scholar of
the stamp of Thyer was acquainted with the 'Adamo Caduto'; and it says
much for the isolation of England that, at a period when poems on the
subject of paradise lost were being scattered broadcast in Italy and
elsewhere - when, in short, all Europe was ringing with the doleful
history of Adam and Eve - Milton could have ventured to speak of
his work as 'Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyma' - an amazing
verse which, by the way, is literally transcribed out of Ariosto
('Cosa, non detta in prosa mai, ne in rima'). But even now the
acquaintance of the British public with the productions of continental
writers is superficial and spasmodic, and such was the ignorance of
English scholars of this earlier period, that Birch maintained that
Milton's drafts, to be referred to presently, indicated his intention of
writing an opera (!); while as late as 1776 the poet Mickle,
notwithstanding Voltaire's authority, questioned the very existence of
Andreini, who has written thirty different pieces.
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