text:  How is it then if Virgil is so inferior to Homer and Tasso in the unity of action the concentration of interest and the delineation of character that he has acquired his prodigious reputation among men? How is it that generation after generation has ratified the opinion of Dante who called him his "Divine Master"--of Petrarch who spent his life in the study of his works? How is it that his verses are so engraven in our recollection that they have become as it were a second nature to every cultivated mind and insensibly recur whenever the beauty of poetry is felt or the charms of nature experienced? Rest assured the judgment of so many ages is right: successive generations and different nations never concur in praising any author unless his works in some respects at least have approached perfection