John Milton, 1608–1674. Born, in London, 9 Dec. 1608. At St. Paul’s School, 1620 (?)–25. Pensioner of Christ’s Coll. Camb., 12 Feb. 1625; matric. 9 April 1625; B.A., 26 March 1629; M.A., 3 July 1632. Lived with his father at Horton, Bucks., July 1632 to April 1638. Travelled on continent, April 1638 to July 1639. On his return, settled in London and took pupils. Took active part in ecclesiastical controversy, 1641–42. Married (i.) Mary Powell, May (?) 1643; separated from her shortly afterwards; reconciled, 1645. Latin Secretary to Council of State, March 1649. Became blind, 1650. Wife died, 1652. Married (ii.) Catharine Woodcock, 12 Nov. 1656; she died, Feb. 1658. At Restoration, was arrested for treasonable publications, summer 1660; released soon afterwards. Married (iii.) Elizabeth Minshull, 24 Feb. 1663. Died, in London, 8 Nov. 1674. Buried in St. Giles’s, Cripplegate. Works: “A Masque (‘Comus’) presented at Ludlow Castle” (anon.), “Lycidas” in “Justa Edouardo King Naufrago,” 1638; “Of Reformation touching Church Discipline in England” (anon.), 1644; “Of Prelatical Episcopacy” (anon.), 1641; “Animadversions upon the Remonstrat’s Defence against Smectymnuus” (anon.), 1641; “The Archbishop of Canterburie’s Dream” (anon.), 1641; “The Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty,” 1641; Tyrannicall Government anatomized” (anon.), 1642; “An Apology against…. ‘A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions’” (anon.), 1642; “News From Hell” (anon.), 1642; “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce” (anon.), 1643; “Of Education” (anon.), (1644); “Areopagitica,” 1644; “Tetrachordon,” 1645; “Colasterion” (anon.), 1645; “Poems,” 1645; “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates” (under initials: J. M.), 1649; “Observations on the Articles of Peace,” 1649; “Ἐικονοκλαστης” (anon.), 1649; “The Grand Case of Conscience … stated” (anon.), 1650; “Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio,” 1650; “The Life and Reign of King Charles” (anon.), 1651; “A Letter written to a Gentleman in the Country,” 1653; “Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda,” 1654; “Prose Defensio contra Alexandrum Morum,” 1655; “Scriptum Domini Protectoris … contra Hispanos,” 1655; “A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes,” 1659; “Considerations touching the likeliest means to remove Hirelings out of the Church,” 1659; “The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth” (anon.), 1659; “Brief Notes upon a late Sermon … by Mathew Griffith,” 1660; “Paradise Lost,” 1667; “Accidence commenc’t Grammar” (anon.), 1669; “The History of Britain,” 1670; “Artis Logicæ Plenior Institutio,” 1670; “Paradise Regained … To which is added ‘Samson Agonistes,’” 1671; “Poems, etc., upon several Occasions,” 1673; “Of True Religion, etc.” (under initials: J. M.), 1673; “Epistolarum Familiarum liber unus,” 1674. Posthumous: “Literæ Pseudo-Senatus Anglicani,” 1676; “Character of the Long Parliament” (possibly spurious), 1681; “A Brief History of Moscovia,” 1682; “De Doctrina Christiana libri duo posthumi,” 1825. He translated: Martin Bucer’s “Judgment concerning Divorce,” 1644; “A Declaration or Letters Patent of the Election of this present King of Poland” (anon.), 1674; and edited: Raleigh’s “Cabinet Council,” 1658.

Personal

  I was born at London, of an honest family; my father was distinguished by the undeviating integrity of his life; my mother, by the esteem in which she was held, and the aims which she bestowed. My father destined me from a child to the pursuits of literature; and my appetite for knowledge was so voracious, that, from twelve years of age, I hardly ever left my studies, or went to bed before midnight. This primarily led to my loss of sight. My eyes were naturally weak, and I was subject to frequent head-aches; which, however, could not chill the ardour of my curiosity, or retard the progress of my improvement. My father had me daily instructed in the grammar-school, and by other masters at home. He then, after I had acquired a proficiency in various languages, and had made a considerable progress in philosophy, sent me to the University of Cambridge. Here I passed seven years in the usual course of instruction and study, with the approbation of the good, and without any stain upon my character, till I took the degree of Master of Arts. After this I did not, as this miscreant feigns, run away into Italy, but of my own accord retired to my father’s house, whither I was accompanied by the regrets of most of the fellows of the college, who shewed me no common marks of friendship and esteem. On my father’s estate, where he had determined to pass the remainder of his days, I enjoyed an interval of uninterrupted leisure, which I entirely devoted to the perusal of the Greek and Latin classics; though I occasionally visited the metropolis, either for the sake of purchasing books, or of learning something new in mathematics or in music, in which I, at that time, found a source of pleasure and amusement. In this manner I spent five years till my mother’s death. I then became anxious to visit foreign parts, and particularly Italy. My father gave me his permission, and I left home with one servant.

  He married his first wife (Mary) Powell, of Fosthill, at Shotover, in Oxonshire…. Two opinions doe not well on the same boulster. She was a … royalist, and went to her mother to the king’s quarters, neer Oxford. I have perhaps so much charity to her that she might not wrong his bed: but what man, especially contemplative, would like to have a young wife environ’d and storm’d by the sons of Mars, and those of the enemi partie?… He was a spare man. He was scarce so tall as I am—quaere, quot feet I am high: resp., of middle stature. He had abroun hayre. His complexion exceeding faire—he was so faire that they called him the lady of Christ’s College. Ovall face. His eie a darke gray. He had a delicate tuneable voice, and had good skill. His father instructed him. He had an organ in his howse: he played on that most. Of a very cheerfull humour.—He would be chearfull even in his gowte-fitts, and sing. He was very healthy and free from all diseases: seldome tooke any physique (only sometimes he tooke manna): only towards his latter end he was visited with the gowte, spring and fall. He had a very good memorie; but I beleeve that his excellent method of thinking and disposing did much to helpe his memorie.

  An Author that liv’d in the Reign of King Charles the Martyr. Had his Principles been as good as his Parts, he had been an Excellent Person; but his demerits towards his Sovereign, has very much sullied his Reputation.

  He was frequently visited in his house [in Petty France] by persons of quality, particularly my lady Ranelagh, whose son for some time he instructed; all learned foreigners of note, who could not pass out of the city without giving a visit to a person so eminent; and, lastly, by particular friends that had a high esteem for him—viz. Mr. Andrew Marvel; young Lawrence (the son of him that was president of Oliver’s council), to whom there is a sonnet among the rest in his printed poems; Mr. Marchamont Needham, the writer of “Politicus;” but, above all, Mr. Cyriack Skinner, whom he honoured with two sonnets…. Those [daughters] he had by his first [wife] he made serviceable to him in that very particular in which he most wanted their service, and supplied his want of eyesight by their eyes and tongue; for, though he had daily about him one or other to read to him—some, persons of man’s estate, who of their own accord greedily catched at the opportunity of being his readers, that they might as well reap the benefit of what they read to him as oblige him by the benefit of their reading; others, of younger years, sent by their parents to the same end—yet, excusing only the eldest daughter by reason of her bodily infirmity and difficult utterance of speech (which, to say truth, I doubt, was the principal cause of excusing her), the other two were condemned to the performance of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse—viz. the Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, Spanish, and French. All which sorts of books to be confined to read without understanding one word must needs be a trial of patience almost beyond endurance; yet it was endured by both for a time…. There [in Jewin-street] he lived when he married his third wife, recommended to him by his old friend, Dr. Paget in Coleman Street.

  Understanding that the mediation used for my admittance to John Milton had succeeded so well that I might come when I would, I hastened to London, and in the first place went to wait upon him. He received me courteously, as well for the sake of Dr. Paget, who introduced me, as of Isaac Penington, who recommended me; to both of whom he bore a good respect. And having inquired divers things of me, with respect to my former progression in learning, he dismissed me, to provide myself such accommodation as might be most suitable to my future studies. I went therefore and took myself a lodging as near his house, which was then in Jewin Street, as conveniently I could; and from thenceforward went every day in the afternoon, except on the first days of the week, and sitting by him in his dining-room, read to him in such books in the Latin tongue as he pleased to hear me read. At my first sitting to read to him, observing that I used the English pronunciation, he told me if I would have the benefit of the Latin tongue, not only to read and understand Latin authors, but to converse with foreigners, either abroad or at home, I must learn the foreign pronunciation. To this I consenting, he instructed me how to sound the vowels…. But this change of pronunciation proved a new difficulty to me…. He, on the other hand, perceiving with what earnest desire I pursued learning, gave me not only all the encouragement, but all the help he could. For, having a curious ear, he understood by my tone when I understood what I read, and when I did not; and accordingly would stop me, examine me, and open the most difficult passages to me. Thus went I on, for about six weeks’ time, reading to him in the afternoons.

  An ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire, Dr. Wright, found John Milton in a small chamber hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow-chair, and dressed neatly in black; pale but not cadaverous; his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk-stones. He used also to sit in a gray, coarse cloth coat, at the door of his house in Bunhill Fields, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air; and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts as well as quality.

  In his youth he is said to have been extremely handsome, and while he was a student at Cambridge, he was called “the Lady of Christ’s-College,” and he took notice of this himself in one of his Public Prolusions before that university; “A quibusdam audivi nuper domina.” The colour of his hair was a light brown; the symmetry of his features exact; enlivened with an agreeable air, and a beautiful mixture of fair and ruddy…. Mr. Wood observes, that “his eyes were none of the quickest.” His stature, as we find it measured by himself, did not exceed the middle-size; he was neither too lean, nor too corpulent; his limbs well proportioned, nervous, and active, serviceable in all respects to his exercising the sword, in which he much delighted, and wanted neither skill, nor courage, to resent an affront from men of the most athletic constitutions. In his diet he was abstemious; not delicate in the choice of his dishes; and strong liquors of all kinds were his aversion. Being too sadly convinced how much his health had suffered by night-studies in his younger years, he used to go early (seldom later than nine) to rest; and rose commonly in the summer at four, and in the winter at five in the morning; but when he was not disposed to rise at his usual hours, he always had one to read to him by his bed-side. At his first rising he had usually a chapter read to him out of the Hebrew bible; and he commonly studied all the morning till twelve, then used some exercise for an hour, afterwards dined, and after dinner played on the organ, and either sung himself, or made his wife sing, who, he said, had a good voice, but no ear, and then he went up to study again till six, when his friends came to visit him, and sat with him till eight. Then he went down to supper, which was usually olives and some light thing; and after supper he smoked his pipe, and drank a glass of water, and went to bed. When his blindness restrained him from other exercises, he had a machine to swing in for the preservation of his health; and diverted himself in his chamber with playing on an organ. He had a delicate ear and excellent voice, and great skill in vocal and instrumental music. His deportment was erect, open and affable; and his conversation easy, cheerful, and instructive.

  In his way of living he was an example of sobriety and temperance. He was very sparing in the use of wine or strong liquors of any kind…. He was likewise very abstemious in his diet, not fastidiously nice or delicate in his choice of dishes, but content with anything that was most in season, or easiest to be procured; eating and drinking (according to the distinction of the philosopher) that he might live, and not living that he might eat or drink. So that probably his gout descended by inheritance from one or other of his parents; or, if it was of his own acquiring, it must have been owing to his studious and sedentary life.

  I am ashamed to relate what I fear is true, that Milton was one of the last students in either university that suffered the public indignity of corporal correction…. Milton has the reputation of having been in his youth eminently beautiful, so as to have been called the Lady of his college. His hair, which was of light brown, parted at the foretop, and hung down upon his shoulders, according to the picture which he has given of Adam. He was, however, not of the heroic stature, but rather below the middle size, according to Mr. Richardson, who mentions him as having narrowly escaped from being short and thick. He was vigorous and active, and delighted in the exercise of the sword, in which he is related to have been eminently skilful…. His eyes are said never to have been bright; but if he was a dexterous fencer, they must have been once quick. His domestick habits, so far as they are known, were those of a severe student. He drank little strong drink of any kind, and fed without excess in quantity, and in his earlier years without delicacy of choice…. Milton, who appears to have had a full conviction of the truth of Christianity, and to have regarded the Holy Scriptures with the profoundest veneration, to have been untainted by any heretical peculiarity of opinion, and to have lived in a confirmed belief of the immediate and occasional agency of Providence, yet grew old without any visible worship. In the distribution of his hours there was no hour of prayer, either solitary or with his household; omitting publick prayers, he omitted all.

	Yea, our blind Poet, who in his later day,
	Stood almost single; uttering odious truth—
	Darkness before, and danger’s voice behind,
	Soul awful—if the earth has ever lodged
	An awful soul—I seemed to see him here
	Familiarly, and in his scholar’s dress
	Bounding before me, yet a stripling youth—
	A boy, no better, with his rosy cheeks
	Angelical, keen eye, courageous look,
	And conscious step of purity and pride.

  His literature was immense…. With the Hebrew, and its two dialects, he was well acquainted; and of the Greek, Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish languages, he was a master. In Latin, Dr. Johnson observes, his skill was such as places him in the first rank of writers and criticks. In the Italian he was also particularly skilled. His “Sonnets” in that language have received the highest commendation from Italian criticks, both of his own and of modern times. If he had written generally in Italian, it has been supposed, by the late lord Orford, that he would have been the most perfect poet in modern language; for his own strength of thought would have condensed and hardened that speech to a proper degree. The Academy Della Crusca consulted him on the critical niceties of their language. In his early days indeed he had become deeply enamoured of “the two famous renowners of Beatrice and Laura.” It has been rightly remarked, that he read almost all authors, and improved by all: He himself relates, that his “round of study and reading was ceaseless.”

  We have now completed the history of John Milton;—a man in whom were illustriously combined all the qualities that could adorn, or elevate the nature to which he belonged; a man, who at once possessed beauty of countenance, symmetry of form, elegance of manners, benevolence of temper, magnanimity and loftiness of soul, the brightest illumination of intellect, knowledge the most various and extended, virtue that never loitered in her career nor deviated from her course;—a man, who, if he had been delegated as the representative of his species to one of the superior worlds, would have suggested a grand idea of the human race, as of beings affluent with moral and intellectual treasure, who were raised and distinguished in the universe as the favourites and heirs of Heaven.

	… Milton stood before him,
	Gazing with reverent awe—Milton, his guest …
	… Little then, did Galileo think whom he received;
	That in his hand he held the hand of one
	Who could requite him—who would spread his name
	O’er lands and seas—great as himself, nay, greater.

  John Milton, the poet, the statesman, the philosopher, the glory of English literature, the champion and the martyr of English liberty…. Neither blindness, nor gout, nor age, nor penury, nor domestic afflictions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor proscription, nor neglect, had power to disturb his sedate and majestic patience. His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they were singularly equable. His temper was serious, perhaps stern; but it was a temper which no sufferings could render sullen or fretful. Such as it was, when, on the eve of great events, he returned from his travels, in the prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with literary distinction and glowing with patriotic hopes, such it continued to be—when, after having experienced every calamity which is incident to our nature, old, poor, sightless, and disgraced, he retired to his hovel to die!

  Milton alone remained faithful to the memory of Cromwell. While minor authors, vile, perjured, bought by restored power, insulted the ashes of a great man at whose feet they had grovelled, Milton gave him an asylum in his genius, as in an inviolable temple. Milton might have been reinstated in office. His third wife (for he espoused two after the death of Mary Powell) beseeching him to accept his former place as Secretary, he replied, “You are a woman, and would like to keep your carriage; but I will die an honest man.” Remaining a Republican, he wrapped himself in his principles, with his Muse and his poverty. He said to those who reproached him with having served a tyrant, “He delivered us from kings.” Milton affirmed that he had only fought for the cause of God and of his country. One day, walking in St. James’s Park, he suddenly heard repeated near him, “The king! the king!” “Let us withdraw,” he said to his guide, “I never loved kings.” Charles II. accosted the blind man. “Thus, Sir, has Heaven punished you for having conspired against my father.” “Sire,” he replied, “if the ills that afflict us in this world be the chastisements for our faults, your father must have been very guilty.”

  We have offered no apology for expanding to such length our commentary on the character of John Milton; who, in old age, in solitude, in neglect, and blind, wrote the “Paradise Lost;” a man whom labor or danger never deterred from whatever efforts a love of the supreme interests of man prompted. For are we not the better; are not all men fortified by the remembrance of the bravery, the purity, the temperance, the toil, the independence and the angelic devotion of this man, who, in a revolutionary age, taking counsel only of himself, endeavored, in his writings and in his life, to carry out the life of man to new heights of spiritual grace and dignity, without any abatement of its strength?

  Indignant at every effort to crush the spirit, and to cheat it, in his own words, “of that liberty which rarefies and enlightens it like the influence of heaven,” he proclaimed the rights of man as a rational immortal being, undismayed by menace and obloquy, amid a generation of servile and unprincipled sycophants. The blindness which excluded him from the things of earth opened to him more glorious and spiritualized conceptions of heaven, and aided him in exhibiting the full influence of those sublime truths which the privilege of free inquiry in religious matters had poured upon the mind.

  Perhaps no man ever inhabited more houses than our great epic poet, yet scarcely one of these now remains…. We come now to Milton’s last house, the narrow house appointed for all living, in which he laid his bones beside those of his father. This was in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate. He died on Sunday, the 8th of November, 1674, and was buried on the 12th. His funeral is stated to have been very splendidly and numerously attended. By the parish registry we find that he was buried in the chancel: “John Milton, gentleman. Consumption. Chancell. 12. Nov., 1674.” Dr. Johnson supposed that he had no inscription, but Aubrey distinctly states that “when the two steppes to the communion-table were raysed in 1690, his stone was removed.” Milton’s grave remained a whole century without a mark to point out where the great poet lay, till in 1793 Mr. Whitbread erected a bust and an inscription to his memory. What is more, there is every reason to believe that his remains were, on this occasion of raising the chancel and removing the stone, disturbed. The coffin was disinterred and opened, and numbers of relic-hunters were eager to seize and convey off fragments of his bones. The matter at the time occasioned a sharp controversy, and the public were at length persuaded to believe that they were not the remains of Milton, but of a female, that by mistake had been thus treated. But when the workmen had the inscribed stone before them, and dug down directly below it, what doubt can there be that the remains were those of the poet? By an alteration in the church when it was repaired in 1682, that which was the old chancel ceased to be the present one, and the remains of Milton thus came to lie in the great central aisle. The monument erected by Whitbread marks, as near as possible, the place. The bust is by Bacon. It is attached to a pillar, and beneath it is this inscription:

	JOHN MILTON,
	AUTHOR OF PARADISE LOST,
	BORN DECR., 1608
	DIED NOVR., 1674.
	His father, John Milton, died March, 1646.
	They were both interred in this church.
	—————
	Samuel Whitbread posuit, 1793.

  No one can read Milton’s writings, or contemplate his life, without being persuaded that his first desire was the freedom, and through that, the happiness of his country.

  The best portraits of Milton represent him seated at the foot of an oak at sunset, his face turned towards the beams of the departing luminary, and dictating his verses to his well-beloved Deborah, listening attentively to the voice of her father; while his wife Elizabeth looks on him as Eve regarded her husband after her fault and punishment. His two younger daughters meanwhile gather flowers from the meadows, that he may inhale some of the odors of Eden which perfumed his dreams. Our thoughts turn involuntarily to the lot of that wife and daughters, after the death of the illustrious old man on whom they were attending; and the poet, thus brought back to our eyes again, becomes more interesting than the poem. Happy are they whose glory is watered with tears! Such reputation penetrates to the heart, and in the heart alone the poet’s name becomes immortal.

  With respect to the worldly circumstances of this great man, little is known with certainty. It is evident that during his travels, and after his return, the allowance made him by his father was liberal. It was adequate, we may see, to the support of himself and his two nephews, for it is not likely that his sister paid him anything for them. He must also have considered himself able to support a family, without keeping school, when he married Miss Powell. He of course inherited the bulk of his father’s property, but of the amount of it we are ignorant; all we know is that it included the interest in his house in Bread-street. His losses were not inconsiderable. A sum of £2000, which he had invested in the Excise Office, was lost at the Restoration, as the Government refused to recognize the obligations of the Commonwealth; according to the account of his granddaughter, he lost another sum of £2000, by placing it in the hands of a money-scrivener; and he also lost at the Restoration a property of £60 a year out of the lands of the Dean and Chapter of Westminster, which he very probably had purchased. His house in Bread-street was destroyed by the Great Fire. The whole property which he left behind him, exclusive of his claim on the Powell family for his wife’s fortune, and of his household goods, did not exceed £1500, including the produce of his library, a great part of which he is said to have disposed of before his death.

  He stands before us as perhaps the grandest and mightiest individual man in literature,—a man who transmuted all thoughts, passions, acquisitions, and aspirations into the indestructible substance of personal character.

  He attends no church, belongs to no communion, and has no form of worship in his family; notable circumstances, which we may refer, in part at least, to his blindness, but significant of more than that. His religion was of the spirit, and did not take kindly to any form. Though the most Puritan of the Puritans, he had never stopped long in the ranks of any Puritan party, or given satisfaction to Puritan ecclesiastics and theologians. In his youth he had loved the night; in his old age he loves the pure sunlight of early morning as it glimmers on his sightless eyes. The music which had been his delight since childhood has still its charm, and he either sings or plays on the organ or bass violin every day. In his grey coat, at the door of his house in Bunhill Fields, he sits on clear afternoons; a proud, ruggedly genial old man, with sharp satiric touches in his talk, the untunable fibre in him to the last. Eminent foreigners come to see him; friends approach reverently, drawn by the splendour of his discourse. It would range, one can well imagine, in glittering freedom, like “arabesques of lightning,” over all ages and all literatures. He was the prince of scholars; a memory of superlative power waiting as handmaid on the queenliest imagination. The whole spectacle of ancient civilisation, its cities, its camps, its landscapes, was before him. There he sat in his grey coat, like a statue cut in granite. He recanted nothing, repented of nothing; England had made a sordid failure, but he had not failed. His soul’s fellowship was with the great Republicans of Greece and Rome, and with the Psalmist and Isaiah and Oliver Cromwell.

  I do not find that Milton, though he wrote against paid ministers as hirelings, ever expressly formulated an opinion against ministers as such. But as has already been hinted, there grew up in him, in the last period of his life, a secret sympathy with the mode of thinking which came to characterise the Quaker sect. Not that Milton adopted any of their peculiar fancies. He affirms categorically the permissibility of oaths, of military service, and requires that women should keep silence in the congregation. But in negativing all means of arriving at truth except the letter of Scripture interpreted by the inner light, he stood upon the same platform as the followers of George Fox.

  As a man, too, not less than as a poet, Milton has a side of unsurpassable grandeur. A master’s touch is the gift of nature. Moral qualities, it is commonly thought, are in our own power. Perhaps the germs of such qualities are in their greater or less strength as much a part of our natural constitution as the sense for style. The range open to our own will and power, however, in developing and establishing them, is evidently much larger. Certain high moral dispositions Milton had from nature, and he sedulously trained and developed them until they became habits of great power.

  On the 4th of August, 1790, according to a small volume written by Philip Neve, Esq. (of which two editions were published in the same year), Milton’s coffin was removed and his remains exhibited to the public on the 4th and 5th of that month. Mr. George Stevens, the great editor of Shakspere, who justly denounced the indignity intended, not offered, to the great Puritan poet’s remains by Royalist Landsharks, satisfied himself that the corpse was that of a woman of fewer years than Milton…. Mr. Stevens’s assurance gives us good reason for believing that Mr. Philip Neve’s indignant protest is only good in general, and that Milton’s hallowed reliques still rest undisturbed within their peaceful shrine.

  Although the “Prince of Poets” was born and died in London, received part of his education in London, was married frequently in London, and lived in many houses in the metropolis, there is left to-day hardly a trace of anything that he has touched, or that is in any way associated with him. Even his grave was desecrated, and the precise spot in which his bones lie cannot now be discovered.

  On the whole, Milton’s character was not an amiable one, nor even wholly estimable. It is probable that he never in the course of his whole life did anything that he considered wrong; but unfortunately, examples are not far to seek of the facility with which desire can be made to confound itself with deliberate approval. That he was an exacting, if not a tyrannical husband and father, that he held in the most peremptory and exaggerated fashion the doctrine of the superiority of man to woman, that his egotism in a man who had actually accomplished less would be held ludicrous and half disgusting, that his faculty of appreciation beyond his own immediate tastes and interests was small, that his intolerance surpassed that of an inquisitor, and that his controversial habits and manners outdid the license even of that period of controversial abuse,—these are propositions which I cannot conceive to be disputed by any competent critic aware of the facts. If they have ever been denied, it is merely from the amiable but uncritical point of view which blinks all a man’s personal defects in consideration of his literary genius. That we cannot afford to do here, especially as Milton’s personal defects had no small influence on his literary character.

  There is something very fascinating in the records we have of Milton’s one visit to the Continent. A more impressive Englishman never left our shores. Sir Philip Sidney perhaps approaches him nearest. Beautiful beyond praise, and just sufficiently conscious of it to be careful never to appear at a disadvantage, dignified in manners, versed in foreign tongues, yet full of the ancient learning,—a gentleman, a scholar, a poet, a musician, and a Christian,—he moved about in a leisurely manner from city to city, writing Latin verses for his hosts and Italian sonnets in their ladies’ albums, buying books and music, and creating, one cannot doubt, an all too flattering impression of an English Protestant.

	The new world honors him whose lofty plea
	For England’s freedom made her own more sure,
	Whose song, immortal as its theme, shall be
	Their common freehold while both worlds endure.

  The vision we have of him is that of a blind, fresh-complexioned, and lightish-haired man, of middle stature or somewhat less, and of slender figure, dressed still usually in a grey suit, and with a small silver-hilted sword by his side, piloted about by some boy or more mature companion, partly for exercise and partly for calls at favourite book-shops. Blind though he was, it was only by his gait that you knew it, for his eyes were clear and without speck or blemish. Nor, though the face was sad and careworn, did it tell the age at which he had arrived. From the still lightish hair and a tinge of colour still in the fair complexion, you would have judged him younger than he was.

  Milton was nicknamed the “lady” at college, from his delicate complexion and slight make. He was, however, a good fencer, and thought himself a “match for any one.” Although respected by the authorities, his proud and austere character probably kept him aloof from much of the coarser society of the place. He shared the growing aversion to the scholasticism against which one of his exercises is directed. Like Henry More, who entered Christ’s in Milton’s last year, he was strongly attracted by Plato, although he was never so much a philosopher as a poet. He already considered himself as dedicated to the utterance of great thoughts, and to the strictest chastity and self-respect, on the ground that he who would “write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.”

  In Milton’s life, as in Milton’s prose writings, occur passages which are not admirable, which are indeed the reverse of admirable. The student of literature, we may presume, is a lover of beauty, and the temptation with him to shirk the ugly passages of a life is a temptation easily understood. Here he may say, as Mr. Matthew Arnold has said of Shelley, here, in “Comus” and “Samson,” here in the Council Chamber sheltering Davenant from dangers incurred through his Royalist ardours, here, in company with Lawrence, listening to the lute well touched, is the Milton we desire to know, the Milton who delights. Let us, at least as long as we are able, avert our eyes from the Milton who disgusts, from the unamiable Milton, the Milton who calls his opponent “an idiot by breeding and a solicitor by presumption,” the Milton who helped to embitter his daughters’ lives, and remembered them as “unkind children” in his will. What is gained by forcing this disgusting Milton on our attention? We choose, if we can, to retain a charming picture of the great poet. The delightful Milton is the true Milton after all. Ah, give us back the delightful Milton!

  But he is more than idealist or artist—he was a superlatively noble, brave, truly conscientious man, who could never have intentionally done a mean thing; who was pure and clean in thought, speech, and action; who was patriotic to the point of sublime self-sacrifice; who loved his neighbor to the point of risking his life for republican principles of liberty; who, finally, spent his every moment as in the sight of the God he both worshiped and loved. Possessed of sublime powers, his thought was to make the best use of them to the glory of God and the good of his fellow-man. We may not think that he always succeeded; but who among the men of our race save Washington is such an exemplar of high and holy and effective purpose? Beside his white and splendid flame nearly all the other great spirits of earth burn yellow, if not low. Truly, as Wordsworth said, his soul was like a star; and, if it dwelt apart, should we therefore love it the less? It is more difficult to love the sublime than to love the approximately human, but the necessity for such love is the essence of the first and greatest commandment.

  It was fortunate for the harmonious development of Milton’s genius that during the critical years between youth and manhood, years which in most men’s lives are fullest of turmoil and dubiety, he was enabled to live a life of quiet contemplation. His nature was fiercely polemical, and without this period of calm set between his college life and his life as a public disputant, the sweeter saps of his mind would never have come to flower and fruitage. It was particularly fortunate, too, that this interim should be passed in the country, where the lyric influences were softest, where all that was pastoral and genial in his imagination was provoked. The special danger of men of his stamp, in whom will and doctrine are constantly president over impulse, is the loss of plasticity, the stiffening of imagination in its bonds.

Comus, 1634–37

  MY LORD: This poem, which received its first occasion of birth from your self and others of your noble family, and much honour from your own person in the performance, now returns again to make a finall dedication of itself to you. Although not openly acknowledged by the author, yet it is a legitimate offspring, so lovely, and so much desired, that the often copying of it hath tired my pen to give my severall friends satisfaction, and brought me to a necessity of producing it to the publike view, and now to offer it up in all rightful devotion to those fair hopes and rare endowments of your much-promising youth, which gave a full assurance, to all that knew you, of a future excellence.

  Since your going, you have charged me with new obligations, both for a very kinde letter from you, dated the sixth of this month, and for a charity piece of entertainment which came therewith;—wherein I should much commend the tragical part if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your songs and odes; whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen nothing parallel in our language.

  On the whole, whether “Comus” be or be not deficient as a drama, whether it is considered as an epic drama, a series of lines, a mask, or a poem, I am of opinion that Milton is here only inferior to his own “Paradise Lost.”

  A work more truly poetical is rarely found; allusions, images, and descriptive epithets, embellish almost every period with lavish decoration. As a series of lines, therefore, it may be considered as worthy of all the admiration with which the votaries have received it.

  Even Milton deigned to contribute one of his most fascinating poems to the service of the drama; and, notwithstanding the severity of his puritanic tenets, “Comus” could only have been composed by one who felt the full enchantment of the theatre.

  Can there be a test of merit more indisputable than this?—for “Comus,” though by no means faultless as a Masque, has to boast of a poetry more rich and imaginative than is to be found in any other composition save “The Tempest” of Shakspeare.

  It is, certainly, the noblest performance of the kind which exists in any language.

  What sensibility breathes in the descriptions of the benighted Lady’s singing, by Comus and the Spirit.

  A young girl and her brothers are benighted and separated as they pass through a forest in Herefordshire. How meagre is this solitary fact! how barren a paragraph would it have made for the Herefordshire journal,—had such a journal been then in existence! Submit it to Milton, and beautiful is the form which it assumes. Then rings that wood with the jocund revelry of Comus and his company; and the maiden draws near, in the strength of unblemished chastity, and her courage waxes strong as she sees

	“A sable cloud
	Turn forth her silver lining on the night”—

and she calls upon Echo to tell her of the flowery cave which hides her brothers, and Echo betrays her to the enchanter. Then comes the spirit from the “starry threshold of Jove’s court,” and in shepherd-weeds leads on the brothers to her rescue; and the necromancer is put to flight, but not till he has bound up the lady in fetters of stone; and Sabrina hastens from under her “translucent wave” to dissolve the spell—and again they all three bend their happy steps back to the roof of their fathers. This is not extravagant rhapsody—the tale is still actually preserved; but it is preserved like a fly in amber. The image is a mere thing of wood, but Milton enshrines it, and it becomes an object of worship.

  One of the last and loveliest radiations of the dramatic spirit, which seemed almost to live its life out in about half a century of English literature, beginning in the times of Queen Elizabeth, and ending in those of Charles the First…. Of “Comus,” I think, it might be said, as truly as of any poem in the language, that it is admirably adapted to inspire a real feeling for poetry. It abounds with so much of true imagination, such attractiveness of fancy, such grace of language and of metre, and withal contains so much thought and wisdom wherewith to win a mind unused to the poetic processes, that were I asked what poem might best be chosen to awaken the imagination to a healthful activity, I would point to Milton’s “Comus,” as better fitted than almost any other for the purpose.

  With these sounds left on the ear, and a final glow of angelic light on the eye, the performance ends, and the audience rises and disperses through the castle. The castle is now a crumbling ruin, along the ivy-clad walls and through the dark passages of which the visitor clambers or gropes his way, disturbing the crows and the martlets in their recesses; but one can stand yet in the doorway through which the parting guests of that night descended into the inner court; and one can see where the stage was, on which the sister was lost by her brothers, and Comus revelled with his crew, and the lady was fixed as marble by enchantment, and Sabrina arose with her water-nymphs, and the swains danced in welcome of the earl, and the Spirit gloriously ascended to its native heaven. More mystic it is to leave the ruins, and, descending one of the winding streets that lead from the castle into the valley of the Teme, to look upwards to castle and town seen as one picture, and, marking more expressly the three long pointed windows that gracefully slit the chief face of the wall towards the north, to realize that it was from that ruin, and from those windows in the ruin, that the verse of “Comus” was first shook into the air of England. Much as Milton wrote afterwards, he never wrote anything more beautiful, more perfect than “Comus.”

  The sublimity of Milton’s genius—the quality which, in the literature of his own country at all events, so pre-eminently distinguishes him as a poet—shines forth with marvellous fulness in this glorious work of his youth. The execution falls but little short of the conception. The lyric portions, although perhaps Macaulay goes too far in describing them as completely overshadowing the dramatic, are among the poet’s noblest verse; and the dialogue, though its versification is less stately and its diction less ample than that of Paradise Lost, which indeed almost precludes dramatic declamation, rises at the climax of the moral interest—in the argument between Comus and the Lady—to almost matchless beauty. Indeed there may be those who cannot suppress a wish that Milton had always adhered to this earlier and easier treatment of his favourite metre—easier I mean to hands under which language passed into combinations “musical, as is Apollo’s lute.”

  The tale is told beautifully, simply; without plot or any artifice; and with no regard to superficial probabilities. Frankly discarding everything of the drama, except its form, the poet does not stoop, as, within certain limits, the successful dramatist must, to be a literary mocking-bird. Aloft on his perch, like a nightingale, he fills the grove with his music, varying his note as the subject varies, but always with the same volume of sound and the same rich and mellow tone. None of the masters of English poetry, Milton’s predecessors, not Chaucer, not Spenser, not Shakespeare even, had done much to detract from the originality, or to herald the perfection of Comus. Chaucer’s blank verse is not to be mentioned with that of Milton.

  It is moreover raised above an ethical poem by its imaginative form and power; and its literary worth enables us to consider it, if we choose, apart from its dramatic form. Its imagination, however, sinks at times, and one can scarcely explain this otherwise than by saying that the Elizabethan habit of fantastic metaphor clung to Milton at this time. When he does fall, the fall is made more remarkable by the soaring strength of his loftier flight and by the majesty of the verse. Nothing can be worse in conception than the comparison of night to a thief who shuts up, for the sake of his felony, the stars whose lamps burn everlasting oil in his dark lantern. The better it is carried out and the finer the verse, the worse it is. And yet it is instantly followed by the great passage about the fears of night, the fantasies and airy tongues that syllable men’s names, and by the glorious appeal to conscience, faith, and God, followed in its turn by the fantastic conceit of the cloud that turns out its silver lining on the night. This is the Elizabethan weakness and strength, the mixture of gold and clay, the want of that art-sensitiveness which feels the absurd: and Milton, even in “Paradise Lost,” when he had got further from his originals, falls into it not unfrequently. It is a fault which runs through a good deal of his earlier work, it is more seen in “Comus” than elsewhere; but it was the fault of that poetic age.

  The beautiful soul makes beautiful the outward form; the base act debases the soul of him who commits it. This was Milton’s highest message to the world. This was the witness of Puritanism at its best. This was “the sage and serious doctrine of virginity,” of that singleness of heart and spirit which is the safeguard of purity in marriage or out of marriage. Between the ideal of womanhood formed by Milton in his youth and that of even such a man as Massinger there is a great gulf. To Milton the world is a place in which the lady can break the spells of Comus by the very force of innocence. To Massinger it is a place to be shunned and avoided as altogether evil. His Camiola can only find rest by its renunciation.

  His greatest work, if scale and merit are considered…. The versification, as even Johnson saw, is the versification of “Paradise Lost,” and to my fancy at any rate it has a spring, a variety, a sweep and rush of genius, which are but rarely present later. As for its beauty in parts, quis vituperavit? It is impossible to single out passages, for the whole is golden. The entering address of Comus, the song “Sweet Echo,” the descriptive speech of the Spirit, and the magnificent eulogy of the “sun-clad power of chastity,” would be the most beautiful things where all is beautiful, if the unapproachable “Sabrina fair” did not come later, and were not sustained before and after, for nearly two hundred lines of pure nectar. If poetry could be taught by the reading of it, then indeed the critic’s advice to a poet might be limited to this: “Give your days and nights to the reading of Comus.”

  Judged simply as a masque, “Comus” is perhaps inferior to some of Ben Jonson’s. It is overweighted with moral teaching and lacks the lightening influence of humour. But Milton’s genius overflowed the limits of its appointed task, and “Comus” remains a splendid protest, at an hour when such a protest was needed the most, on behalf of a reasonable life. For if “Comus” is the expression of the distaste with which Milton regarded the growing licence of Cavalier society, its production is no less clearly a repudiation of the doctrines of Prynne and the moroser Puritans, to whom the drama was an unholy thing.

  Many years ago, on a summer evening, I wandered through the ruins of Ludlow Castle, in the West of England, where in 1634 the great Earl of Bridgewater, Lord President of Wales, celebrated his entrance into office. The castle has its own wall separate from the wall of Ludlow town, from which town the visitor passes to the castle over moat and drawbridge. The immense thickness of the walls, and the strength of the position on a rocky promontory at the confluence of two beautiful streams, were enough of themselves to attract interest. But the goal to which every foot now tends is the great banquet-hall, now dismantled, where, as a part of the pomp and pageantry of the earl’s inauguration, Milton’s Masque, entitled “Comus,” was first represented. I could imagine the end of the hall turned into a stage; a mimic forest; the young daughter of the house playing the part of the lady, lost in the thickets of the wood; the necromancer and his rout of monsters with heads of beasts and bodies of men; the “barbarous dissonance of Bacchus and his revelers;” the temptation of innocence; the invocation of help; the triumph of virtue. When that Masque was first acted, Milton was a youth unknown, and the castle honored him. Two hundred and fifty years have passed since then, and now it is Milton who gives to Ludlow Castle all its honor. To the pure ambition which that early poem breathed, the poet was true through all his life, and, in spite of French critics, who make a mock at sin and cannot understand how art and faith can ever dwell together, the words of the Attendant Spirit in “Comus” still express, to those who have ears to hear, the mission of his poetry:

	Before the starry threshold of Jove’s court
	My mansion is.

Lycidas, 1638

  One of the poems on which much praise has been bestowed, is “Lycidas;” of which the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing. What beauty there is we must, therefore, seek in the sentiments and images. It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions…. In this poem there is no nature, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral,—easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting: whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted, and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind…. This poem has yet a grosser fault. With these trifling fictions are mingled the most awful and sacred truths, such as ought never to be polluted with such irreverend combinations. The shepherd, likewise, is now a feeder of sheep, and afterwards an ecclesiastical pastor, a superintendent of a Christian flock. Such equivocations are always unskilful: but here they are indecent, and at least approach to impiety,—of which, however, I believe the writer not to have been conscious. Such is the power of reputation justly acquired, that its blaze drives away the eye from nice examination. Surely no man could have fancied that he read “Lycidas” with pleasure had he not known its author.

  “Lycidas,”—though highly poetical,—I agree, with Jonson, breathes little sincere sorrow, and is therefore essentially defective as a Monody.

  In “Lycidas” there is perhaps more poetry than sorrow. But let us read it for its poetry. It is true that passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethus and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs with cloven heel. But poetry does this; and in the hands of Milton does it with a peculiar and irresistible charm.

  Of all Milton’s smaller poems, “Lycidas” is the greatest favourite with me. I cannot agree to the charge which Dr. Johnson has brought against it of pedantry and want of feeling. It is the first emanation of classical sentiment in a youthful scholar,—“most musical, most melancholy!” A certain tender gloom overspreads it, a wayward abstraction, a forgetfulness of his subject in the serious reflections that arise out of it. The gusts of passion come and go like the sounds of music borne on the wind. The loss of the friend whose death he laments seem to have recalled, with double force, the reality of those speculations which they had indulged together; we are transported to classic ground, and a mysterious strain steals responsive on the ear while we listen to the poet

“with eager thought warbling his Doric lay.”

  It has been said that this is not the natural mode of expressing passion—that where it is real, its language is less figurative—and that “where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.” In general this may be true; in the case of Milton its truth may be doubted…. The mind of Milton was perfect fairy-land; and every thought which entered it, whether grave or gay, magnificent or mean, quickly partook of a fairy form.

  The common metre of six accents, which spread so widely during the sixteenth century, seldom tolerated a verse with a compound section. The reluctance to admit these verses was strengthened by the example of Drayton, who rigidly excluded them from the “Polyolbion.” There are, however, a few poems, in which they are admitted freely enough to give a peculiar character to the rhythm. One of these poems is the “Elegy” written by Brysket, (though generally ascribed to Spenser), on the death of Sir Philip Sidney. It has very little poetical merit, but deserves attention, as having undoubtedly been in Milton’s eye, when he wrote his “Lycidas.” From it Milton borrowed his irregular rhimes, and that strange mixture of Christianity and Heathenism, which shocked the feelings and roused the indignation of Johnson. It may he questioned, if the peculiarity in the meter can fairly be considered as a blemish. Like endings, recurring at uncertain distances, impart a wildness and an appearance of negligence to the verse, which suits well with the character of elegy. But to bring in St. Peter hand in hand with a pagan deity is merely ludicrous; it was the taste of the age, and that is all that can be urged in its excuse. Still, however, the beauties of this singular poem may well make us tolerant of even greater absurdity. No work of Milton has excited warmer admiration, or called forth more strongly the zeal of the partizan.

  For stately discrimination of language, “Lycidas” is a model unsuperseded to the present day.

  “Lycidas” appeals not only to the imagination, but to the educated imagination. There is no ebb and flow of poetical power as in “Comus;” it is an advance on all his previous work, and it fitly closes the poetic labour of his youth. It is needless to analyse it, and all criticism is weaker than the poem itself. Yet we may say that one of its strange charms is its solemn undertone rising like a religious chaunt through the elegiac musick; the sense of a stern national crisis in the midst of its pastoral mourning; the sense of Milton’s grave force of character among the flowers and fancies of the poem; the sense of the Christian religion pervading the classical imagery. We might say that these things are ill-fitted to each other. So they would be, were not the art so fine and the poetry so over-mastering; were they not fused together by genius into a whole so that the unfitness itself becomes fascination.

  In “Lycidas” (1637) we have reached the high-water mark of English poesy and of Milton’s own production. A period of a century and a half was to elapse before poetry in England seemed, in Wordsworth’s “Ode on Immortality” (1807), to be rising again toward the level of inspiration which it had once attained in “Lycidas.”… “Lycidas” opens up a deeper vein of feeling, a patriot passion so vehement and dangerous that, like that which stirred the Hebrew prophet, it is compelled to veil itself from power, or from sympathy, in utterance made purposely enigmatical.

  Mr. Arnold, like everyone else who speaks with authority on such matters, is horrified when Dr. Johnson bluntly condemns “Lycidas.” Now I could read over the “Allegro” and “Penseroso” a thousand times without tiring of them “Comus,” “Paradise Regained,” the other secondary poems, all of them, give me great pleasure, though in different degrees; but as for “Lycidas,” well, I say ditto to old Sam. In the first place the kind of idyll is not to my taste. If a poet really sorrows over the death of a friend to that degree that he cannot, as a relief to the soul, refrain from pouring out his sorrow in song, I think his utterance should be natural and straightforward; he should not speak in a falsetto tone, or overlay his theme with classical affectations. On the other hand, if the grief is only a half grief, conjured up by the imagination to play with like a toy, then, in my opinion, the bard had better hold his tongue. In the second place, the jumbling together of Christian and heathen traditions jars upon me just as it jarred upon the tough old dictionary-maker. Nay, besides all this, “Lycidas” appears to me not so much a spontaneous outburst as a self-appointed task. One of Milton’s editors tells us that Mr. King’s friends—Milton being one of those friends—agreed to write, and bind up together, a lot of verses on his death, but that when “Lycidas” made its appearance, it proved so much more important than all the other poems put together, that it was withdrawn from the book, to be afterwards separately published; and even now, I think, traces of the original business-like arrangement are to be found in the elegy as we have it.

  There are indeed blotches in it. The speech of Peter, magnificently as it is introduced, and strangely as it has captivated some critics, who seem to think that anything attacking the Church of England must be poetry, is out of place, and in itself is obscure, pedantic, and grotesque. There is some over-classicism, and the scale of the piece does not admit the display of quite such sustained and varied power as in “Comus.” But what there is, is so exquisite that hardly can we find fault with Mr. Pattison’s hyperbole when he called “Lycidas” the “highwater-mark of English poetry.” Highwater mark even in the physical world is a variable limit. Shakespere constantly, and some other poets here and there in short passages go beyond Milton. But in the same space we shall nowhere find anything that can outgo the passage beginning “Alas what boots it,” down to “head of thine,” and the whole conclusion from “Return Alpheus.” For melody of versification, for richness of images, for curious felicity of expression, these cannot be surpassed.

  A perfect poem.

	The flowers that we lay upon a tomb
	Are withered by the morrow,—ere the crowd
	Which for a moment ceased its hum, and bowed
	Its head, as Death flew by and made a gloom,
	Resumes its whirl. And scarcely longer bloom
	The sculptured wreathes with which a tomb more proud,
	In some pale minster, may have been endowed;
	For marble petals share the common doom.
	But thou canst twine the wreaths that never die;
	And something tells me thou wilt stay behind
	When I am gone; I know it, I know not why.
	The sea-gull’s scream, the wailing of the wind,
	The ocean’s roar, sound like Death’s prophecy:
	I fain would have a garland thou hadst twined.

  “Lycidas” can only just be drawn within a very liberal definition of lyrical verse, but fortunately the best definition is a wide one, and the poem can be quoted of which Tennyson said that the appreciation of it was a touchstone of poetic taste.

  “Lycidas” is the elegy of much more than Edward King; it is the last note of the inspiration of an age that was passing away. It is redolent of the “sweet mournfulness of the Spenserian time, upon whose joys Death is the only intruder.” No such elegy was to adorn our English literature until “two hundred years after.” Shelley and Matthew Arnold produced the two elegiac poems which alone in our language deserve to rank with Milton’s—for the wider scope of “In Memoriam” removes it from this category. “Thyrsis” excels “Lycidas” in the expression of chastened sorrow and tender recollection, but Matthew Arnold loved Clough and Oxford as Milton never loved King of Cambridge. “Adonais” is charged with deeper thought and more harmonious passion; but both owe to “Lycidas” a debt which “Lycidas” owes to no other poem.

  “Lycidas” has a beauty and passion unknown to its Alexandrian predecessors, and it has not a touch of their oriental effeminacy and licentiousness…. The rhythm is varied, and flows now in leaping waves, now in long rolling billows that carry all before them, like the surging periods of “Paradise Lost.” There is probably no short poem in the language the rhythm of which has been more deservedly praised and studied, or more despaired of by other poets. Milton’s mastery of rhythm, remarkable from the first, almost culminated in “Lycidas,” in spite of the fact that he was there subjected (practically for the last time) to what he afterward called “the troublesome and modern boundage of riming.”

  Of the language of “Lycidas” perhaps the less said the better, for no analysis can hope to capture its secret.

Paradise Lost, 1667

  Paradise lost. | A | Poem | written in | Ten Books | By John Milton. | Licensed and Entred according | to Order. | London | Printed, and are to be sold by Peter Parker | under Creed Church neer Aldgate; And by | Robert Boulter at the Turks Head in Bishopsgate-street; | And Matthias Walker, under St. Dunstons Church | in Fleet-street, 1667.

  Mr. Sam. Symons entered for his copie, under the hands of Mr. Thomas Tomkyns and Mr. Warden Royston, a Booke or Copie Intituled Paradise Lost, a Poem in Tenne bookes, by J. M. 6d.

	Thou hast not miss’d one thought that could be fit,
	And all that was improper dost omit;
	So that no room is here for writers left,
	But to detect their ignorance or theft.
	That majesty which thro’ thy work doth reign
	Draws the devout, deterring the profane;
	And things divine thou treat’st of in such state
	As them preserves, and thee, inviolate.
	At once delight and horror on us seize,
	Thou sing’st with so much gravity and ease;
	And above human flight dost soar aloft,
	With plume so strong, so equal, and so soft:
	The bird named from that paradise you sing
	So never flags, but always keeps on wing.
	Whence could’st thou words of such a compass find?
	Whence furnish such a vast expense of mind?
	Just heaven thee, like Tiresias, to requite,
	Rewards with prophecy thy loss of sight.

  That “Paradise Lost” of Milton, which some are pleased to call a poem.

	Milton, whose Muse with such a daring Flight,
	Led out the warring Saraphims to fight.

  Imitation is a nice point, and there are few poets who deserve to be models in all they write. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” is admirable; but am I therefore bound to maintain, that there are no flats amongst his elevations, when it is evident he creeps along sometimes for above an hundred lines together? Cannot I admire the height of his invention, and the strength of his expression, without defending his antiquated words, and the perpetual harshness of their sound? It is as much commendation as a man can bear, to own him excellent; all beyond it is idolatry.

  As for Mr. Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his subject is not that of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and his human persons are but two. But I will not take Mr. Rymer’s work out of his hands: he has promised the world a critique on that author; wherein though he will not allow his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us, that his thoughts are elevated, his words sounding, and that no man has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated his Grecisms, and the Latin elegances of Virgil. It is true, he runs into a flat of thought, sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he is got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spenser did Chaucer…. Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him, by the example of Hannibal Caro, and other Italians, who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme, (which I have not now the leisure to examine), his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it; which is manifest in his Juvenilia, or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer, though not a poet.

  As the first place among our English poets is due to Milton, and as I have drawn more quotations out of him than from any other, I shall enter into a regular criticism upon his “Paradise Lost,” which I shall publish every Saturday till I have given my thoughts upon that poem…. I must likewise take notice, that there are in Milton several words of his own coining, as Cerberean, miscreated, hell-doom’d, embryon atoms, and many others. If the reader is offended at this liberty in our English poet, I would recommend him to a discourse in Plutarch, which shows us how frequently Homer has made use of the same liberty. Milton, by the above-mentioned helps, and by the choice of the noblest words and phrases which our tongue would afford him, has carried our language to a greater height than any of the English poets have ever done before or after him, and made the sublimity of his style equal to that of his sentiments…. This redundancy of those several ways of speech, which Aristotle calls “foreign language,” and with which Milton has so very much enriched, and in some places darkened, the language of his poem, was the more proper for his use because his poem is written in blank verse.

  It must be acknowledged that till about forty years ago Great Britain was barren of critical learning, though fertile in excellent writers; and in particular had so little taste for epic poetry, and was so unacquainted with the essential properties and peculiar beauties of it, that “Paradise Lost,” an admirable work of that kind, published by Mr. Milton, the great ornament of his age and country, lay many years unspoken of and entirely disregarded, till at length it happened that some persons of great delicacy and judgment found out the merit of that excellent poem, and, by communicating their sentiments to their friends, propagated the esteem of the author, who soon acquired universal applause.

  “Paradise Lost” had been printed forty years before it was known to the greatest part of England that there barely was such a book.

  When Milton first published his famous poem, the first edition was long of going off; few either read, liked, or understood it; and it gained ground merely by its merit.

  Milton’s style, in his “Paradise Lost,” is not natural; ’tis an exotic style.—As his subject lies a good deal out of our world, it has a particular propriety in those parts of the poem: and, when he is on earth, wherever he is describing our parents in Paradise, you see he uses a more easy and natural way of writing.—Though his formal style may fit the higher parts of his own poem, it does very ill for others who write on natural and pastoral subjects.

  The British nation, which has produced the greatest men in every profession, before the appearance of Milton could not enter into any competition with antiquity, with regard to the sublime excellencies of poetry. Greece could boast an Euripides, Eschylus, Sophocles and Sappho; England was proud of her Shakespeare, Spenser, Johnson and Fletcher; but their then ancients had still a poet in reserve superior to the rest, who stood unrivalled by all succeeding times, and in epic poetry, which is justly esteemed the highest effort of genius, Homer had no rival. When Milton appeared, the pride of Greece was humbled, the competition became more equal, and since “Paradise Lost” is ours; it would, perhaps, be an injury to our national fame to yield the palm to any state, whether ancient or modern.

	Nor second He, that rode sublime
	Upon the seraph-wings of Extasy,
	The secrets of the abyss to spy.
	He pass’d the flaming bounds of place and time:
	The living throne, the sapphire blaze,
	Where angels tremble while they gaze,
	He saw; but blasted with excess of light,
	Closed his eyes in endless night.

  “What? the barbarian who constructed a long commentary on the first chapter of Genesis in ten books of harsh verse? The clumsy imitator of the Greeks who caricatures creation and who, while Moses represents the Eternal Being as creating the world by his word, makes the Messiah take a big compass out of a cupboard in heaven to trace out the work? What? I admire the man who has spoilt Tasso’s hell and Tasso’s devil; who makes Lucifer masquerade, now as a toad, now as a pigmy; who puts the same speech in his mouth a hundred times over; who represents him as arguing on divinity; who, in attempting a serious imitation of Ariosto’s comic invention of fire-arms, makes the devils fire cannon in heaven? Neither I, nor anybody in Italy, has ever been able to take pleasure in all these dismal extravagances. His marriage of Sin and Death, and the snakes of which Sin is delivered, make any man of tolerably delicate taste sick, and his long description of a hospital is only good for a grave-digger. This obscure, eccentric, and disgusting poem was despised at its birth: and I treat it to-day as it was treated in its own country by its own contemporaries. Anyhow, I say what I think, and I really care very little whether others agree with me or not.”

  His “Paradise Lost” was overlooked in the reign of Charles II., an age as destitute of the noble ideas of taste, as it was of those of virtue. Some of the small poets who lived in the sunshine of the court, and now and then produced a madrigal or a song, were much more regarded than Milton.

  Adam and Eve, in the state of innocence, are well imagined, and admirably supported; and the different sentiments arising from difference of sex, are traced out with inimitable delicacy, and philosophical propriety. After the fall, he makes them retain the same characters, without any other change than what the transition from innocence to guilt might be supposed to produce: Adam has still that pre-eminence in dignity, and Eve in loveliness, which we should naturally look for in the father and mother of mankind.—Of the blessed spirits, Raphael and Michael are well distinguished; the one for affability, and peculiar good-will to the human race; the other for majesty, but such as commands veneration, rather than fear.—We are sorry to add, that Milton’s attempt to soar still higher, only shows, that he had already soared as high, as, without being “blasted with excess of light,” it is possible for the human imagination to rise.

  I am now to examine “Paradise Lost,” a poem which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the second, among the productions of the human mind…. There is perhaps no poem, of the same length, from which so little can be taken without apparent mutilation…. The thoughts which are occasionally called forth in the progress, are such as could only be produced by an imagination in the highest degree fervid and active, to which materials were supplied by incessant study and ultimate curiosity. The heat of Milton’s mind may be said to sublimate his learning, to throw off into his work the spirit of science, unmingled with its grosser parts…. He can please when pleasure is required; but it is his peculiar power to astonish. The want of human interest is always felt. “Paradise Lost” is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master and seek for companions.

  Was there ever anything so delightful as the music of the “Paradise Lost.” It is like that of a fine organ; has the fullest and deepest tones of majesty, with all the softness and elegance of the Dorian flute. Variety without end, and never equalled unless perhaps by Virgil. Yet the Doctor has little or nothing to say upon this copious theme, but talks something about the unfitness of the English language for blank verse, and how apt it is, in the mouth of some readers, to degenerate into declamation. Oh! I could thrash his old jacket, till I made his pension jingle in his pocket.

  The boldness, freedom, and variety of our blank verse is infinitely more favourable than rhyme; to all kinds of sublime poetry. The fullest proof of this is afforded by Milton; an author whose genius led him eminently to the sublime. The whole first and second books of “Paradise Lost,” are continued instances of it.

  Is not Milton a sublimer poet than Homer or Virgil? Are not his personages more sublimely clothed, and do you not know that there is not perhaps one page in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” in which he has not borrowed his imagery from the Scriptures? I allow and rejoice that Christ appealed only to the understanding and the affections; but I affirm that after reading Isaiah, or St. Paul’s “Epistle to the Hebrews,” Homer and Virgil are disgustingly tame to me, and Milton himself barely tolerable.

  Milton has written a sublime poem upon a ridiculous story of eating an apple, and of the eternal vengeance decreed by the Almighty against the whole human race, because their progenitor was guilty of this black and detestable offence.

  Nothing can be farther from my intention than to insinuate that Milton was a plagiarist, or servile imitator; but I conceive, that, having read these sacred poems of very high merit, at the immediate age when his own mind was just beginning to teem with poetry, he retained numberless thoughts, passages, and expressions therein, so deeply in his mind, that they hung inherently on his imagination, and became, as it were, naturalized there.

  The merits of his epic do not, accordingly, consist in regularity of plan so much as in scattered passages of independent beauty, and in the perfection of his poetic diction. The universal admiration of Milton in the eighteenth century is based on his isolated descriptions of paradisaic innocence and beauty, his awful picture of Hell, with the character of its inhabitants, whom he sketched, after the antique, as giants of the Abyss. It is questionable if any real benefit accrued to the language of English poetry from its increased leaning to the Latinism of Milton rather than to the Germanism of Spenser: but this tendency being a fact, Milton must be regarded as the greatest master of style, and in many respects the standard of dignified poetic expression.

  The Genius of Milton, more particularly in respect to its span in immensity, calculated him, by a sort of birth-right, for such an “argument” as the “Paradise Lost:” he had an exquisite passion for what is properly, in the sense of ease and pleasure, poetical Luxury; and with that, it appears to me, he would fain have been content, if he could, so doing, have preserved his self-respect and feel[ing] of duty performed; but there was working in him, as it were, that same sort of thing as operates in the great world to the end of a Prophecy’s being accomplish’d: therefore he devoted himself rather to the ardours than the pleasures of song, solacing himself at intervals with cups of old wine; and those are, with some exceptions the finest parts of the poem.

  He stood alone and aloof above his times, the bard of immortal subjects, and, as far as there is perpetuity in language, of immortal fame. The very choice of those subjects bespoke a contempt for any species of excellence that was attainable by other men. There is something that overawes the mind in conceiving his long deliberated selection of that theme—his attempting it when his eyes were shut upon the face of nature—his dependence, we might almost say, on supernatural inspiration, and in the calm air of strength with which he opens “Paradise Lost,” beginning a mighty performance without the appearance of an effort. Taking the subject all in all, his powers could nowhere else have enjoyed the same scope. It was only from the height of this great argument that he could look back upon eternity past, and forward upon eternity to come; that he could survey the abyss of infernal darkness, open visions of Paradise, or ascend to heaven and breathe empyreal air.

  I am not persuaded that the “Paradise Lost” would not have been more nobly conveyed to posterity, not perhaps in heroic couplets, although even they could sustain the subject if well balanced, but in the stanza of Spenser or of Tasso, or in the terza rima of Dante, which the powers of Milton could easily have grafted on our language.

  Called at Pickering’s in Chancery Lane, who showed us the original agreement between Milton and Symonds for the payment of five pounds for “Paradise Lost.” The contrast of this sum with the £2000 given for [the unexpired term of the copyright of] Mrs. Rundell’s “Cookery,” comprises a history in itself. Pickering, too, gave forty-five guineas for this agreement, three times as much as the whole sum given for the poem. It was part payment, I think?

  The Second great name in the annals of English Poetry is Milton: which is the First, of course, I need not say. Many other Poets have excelled him in variety and versatility; but none ever approached him in intensity of style and thought, in unity of purpose and in the power and grandeur with which he piles up the single monument of Genius, to which his mind is for the time devoted. His Harp may have but one string, but that is such an one, as none but his own finger knows how to touch. “Paradise Lost” has few inequalities; few feeblenesses. It seems not like a work taken up and continued at intervals; but one continuing effort; lasting, perhaps, for years, yet never remitted: elaborated with the highest polish, yet all the marks of ease and simplicity in its composition.

  In the “Paradise Lost”—indeed in every one of his poems—it is Milton himself whom you see; his Satan, his Adam, his Raphael, almost his Eve—are all John Milton; and it is a sense of this intense egotism that gives me the greatest pleasure in reading Milton’s works. The egotism of such a man is a revelation of spirit.

  “The Paradise Lost” is totally unlike all the poetry that has followed it. Even in the controversial metaphysics of his poetry Milton has found no rival; and although Byron, in his “Cain,” has combined tenderness the most touching with a lofty sublimity, still it may be said, with truth, of the Bard of our Republic, that he has never been imitated.

  If the poet sometimes betrays fatigue, if the lyre drops from his wearied hand, he rests, and I rest along with him…. Who ever wrote like this? What poet ever spoke such language? How miserable seem all modern compositions beside these strong and magnificent conceptions.

  The slowness of Milton’s advance to glory is now generally owned to have been much exaggerated: we might say that the reverse was nearer the truth…. It would hardly, however, be said, even in this age, of a poem 3,000 copies of which had been sold in eleven years, that its success had been small; and some, perhaps, might doubt whether “Paradise Lost,” published eleven years since, would have met with a greater demand. There is sometimes a want of congeniality in public taste which no power of genius will overcome. For Milton it must be said by every one conversant with the literature of the age that preceded Addison’s famous criticism, from which some have dated the reputation of “Paradise Lost,” that he took his place among great poets from the beginning.

  Adam and Eve are beautiful, graceful objects, but no one has breathed the Pygmalion life into them; they remain cold statues. Milton’s sympathies were with things rather than with men, the scenery and phenomena of nature, the trim gardens, the burning lake; but as for the phenomena of the mind, he was not able to see them. He has no delineations of mind except Satan, of which we may say that Satan was his own character, the black side of it. I wish however, to be understood not to speak at all in disparagement of Milton; far from that.

  I, if abruptly called upon in that summary fashion to convey a commensurate idea of Milton, one which might at once correspond to his pretensions, and yet be readily intelligible to the savage, should answer perhaps thus:—Milton is not an author amongst authors, not a poet amongst poems, but a power amongst powers; and the “Paradise Lost” is not a book amongst books, not a poem amongst poems, but a central force amongst forces.

  Its sale was no evidence that its merits were comprehended, and may be referred to the general reputation of its author; for we find so accomplished a critic as Sir William Temple, some years later, omitting the name of Milton in his roll of writers who have done honour to modern literature, a circumstance which may, perhaps, be imputed to that reverence for the ancients which blinded Sir William to the merits of their successors. How could Milton be understood in his own generation, in the grovelling, sensual court of Charles the Second? How could the dull eyes, so long fastened on the earth, endure the blaze of his inspired genius? It was not till time had removed him to a distance that he could be calmly gazed on and his merits fairly contemplated. Addison, as is well known, was the first to bring them into popular view, by a beautiful specimen of criticism that has permanently connected his name with that of his illustrious subject. More than half a century later, another great name in English criticism, perhaps the greatest in general reputation, Johnson, passed sentence of a very different kind on the pretensions of the poet. A production more discreditable to the author is not to be found in the whole of his voluminous works; equally discreditable, whether regarded in an historical light or as a sample of literary criticism.

  To the judgment of each individual, among his readers, it must be left, to determine for himself, how far, in the course of his “adventurous song,” the poet’s prayer for divine illumination has been answered in the sequel. The theology of the poem, in various passages of the deepest interest, may be seriously questioned, but shall here be left with one remark only (not effecting its doctrinal points), namely, that he would be a bold critic who, as a believer in the Christian faith, should venture to justify the extent to which the author has employed the doubtful, though, hitherto, undisputed license of fiction in the supernatural agency of his poem. At the same time, far be it from the present writer to arraign the poet, either of wilful or negligent impiety. It need not be mooted here, whether he considered himself fully authorized to exercise such perilous freedom, but, assuredly, he was mistaken. Tasso, Marini, Camoens, and other epic poets, have likewise intermeddled with “things that were too high for them,” and these have all egregiously miscarried, their spiritual agents having been uniformly the most indifferent, and the least effective personages in their stories. Milton far transcends all his predecessors in the use of such preternatural machinery, while none, that have come after, have been able to approach the power and ability with which he has wielded it.

  “Paradise Lost” is a study for imagination and elaborate musical structure. Take almost any passage, and a lecture might be read from it on contrasts and pauses, and other parts of metrical harmony; while almost every word has its higher poetical meaning and intensity; but all is accompanied with a certain oppressiveness of ambitious and conscious power.

  In “Paradise Lost” we feel as if we were admitted to the outer courts of the Infinite. In that all-glorious temple of genius inspired by truth, we catch the full diapason of the heavenly organ. With its first choral swell the soul is lifted from the earth. In the “Divina Commedia” the man, the Florentine, the exiled Ghibelline, stands out, from first to last, breathing defiance and revenge. Milton, in some of his prose works, betrays the partisan also; but in his poetry we see him in the white robes of the minstrel, with upturned though sightless eyes, rapt in meditation at the feet of the heavenly muse. Dante, in his dark vision, descends to the depths of the world of perdition, and, homeless fugitive as he is, drags his proud and prosperous enemies down with him, and buries them, doubly destroyed, in the flaming sepulchres of the lowest hell. Milton, on the other hand, seems almost to have purged off the dross of humanity. Blind, poor, friendless, in solitude and sorrow, with quite as much reason as his Italian rival to repine at his fortune and war against mankind, how calm and unimpassioned is he in all that concerns his own personality! He deemed too highly of his divine gift, to make it the instrument of immortalizing his hatreds. One cry, alone, of sorrow at his blindness, one pathetic lamentation over the evil days on which he had fallen, bursts from his full heart. There is not a flash of human wrath in all his pictures of woe. Hating nothing but evil spirits, in the childlike simplicity of his heart, his pure hands undefiled with the pitch of the political intrigues in which he had lived, he breathes forth his inexpressibly majestic strains,—the poetry not so much of earth as of heaven.

  Milton is one of the three great Christian poets who were to the theogony of the Middle Ages what Homer was to the Olympus of paganism. The triumvirate consists of Dante, Tasso, and Milton. The “Divine Comedy” of Dante, the “Jerusalem Delivered” of Tasso, the “Paradise Lost” of Milton, are the Iliads and Odysseys of our theological system…. Milton is the least original of the three great Christian poets. At first he imitates Homer, then Virgil, and lastly Dante and Tasso; but his real model is Dante. He impresses the same supernatural subject on the Christian theogony; he sings to England what Italy has already heard—the strife of created angels in revolt against their Maker—the blissful loves of Eden—the seduction of woman—the fall of man—the intercession of the Son of God with the Father—the mercy obtained by his own sacrifice, and the redemption partially gleaming through the distance, as the dénouement of this sublime tragedy. Finally, he embraces the entire series of mysteries which the philosopher penetrates with his conjectures, the theologian explains, and the poet describes, without demanding of them other components than miracles, images, and emotions. Why, then, did Milton select this overpowering theological subject, and transplant it to England, so rich in Saxon and Celtic traditions, already popular, and admirably adapted for the text of a grand national and original northern epic? The answer is to be found in his character and his life. By nature he was theological, and the youngest half of his existence had been passed in Italy. The first voyage of a youth is a second birth; from it he imbibes new sensations and ideas, which produce a species of personal transformation. The phenomenon of petrification is not confined to the effect of water upon a plant; it operates upon man through the air that he breathes.

Sublime as Milton’s immemorial theme.

  Make a man of Milton’s force and affluence of imagination half-intoxicated and half-crazy, and any enterprising bookseller might draw from the lees of his mind a “Festus” once a week, and each monstrosity would doubtless be hailed by some readers, who think they have a taste for poetry, as a greater miracle of genius than “Paradise Lost.”

  How noble this metre is in Milton’s hands, how completely it shows itself capable of the grand, nay of the grandest, style, I need not say. To this metre, as used in the “Paradise Lost,” our country owes the glory of having produced one of the only two poetical works in the grand style which are to be found in the modern languages; the Divine Comedy of Dante is the other. England and Italy here stand alone; Spain, France and Germany have produced great poets, but neither Calderon, nor Corneille, nor Schiller, nor even Goethe, has produced a body of poetry in the true grand style, in the sense in which the style of the body of Homer’s poetry, or Pindar’s, or Sophocles’s, is grand. But Dante has, and so has Milton; and in this respect Milton possesses a distinction which even Shakesspeare, undoubtedly the supreme poetical power in our literature, does not share with him. Not a tragedy of Shakespeare but contains passages in the worst of all styles, the affected style; and the grand style, although it may be harsh, or obscure, or cumbrous, or over-laboured, is never affected. In spite, therefore, of objections which may justly be urged against the plan and treatment of the “Paradise Lost,” in spite of its possessing, certainly, a far less enthralling force of interest to attract and to carry forward the reader than the Iliad or the Divine Comedy, it fully deserves, it can never lose, its immense reputation; for, like the Iliad and the Divine Comedy, nay in some respects to a higher degree than either of them, it is in the grand style.

  In short Milton is a great poet, doubled with a Saumaise, or a Grotius; a genius, nourished on the marrow of lions, on Homer, Isaiah, Virgil, Dante, but also, like the serpent in Eden, chewing the dust of dull polemic. He is a doctor, a preacher, a pedagogue, and when the day comes for him to be able at last to realize the dreams of his youth, and endow his country with an epic, he will construct it of two matters, of gold and of clay, of sublimity and of scholasticism, and will leave us a poem which is at once the most extraordinary and at the same time the most intolerable in existence…. “Paradise Lost” is an unreal poem, a grotesque poem, a tiresome poem. There is not one reader in a hundred who can read Books Nine and Ten without a smile, or Books Eleven and Twelve without a yawn. The thing does not hold together: it is a pyramid balanced on its apex, the most terrible problems solved by the most childish of means. And yet “Paradise Lost” is immortal. It lives by virtue of some episodes which will be for ever famous. In contrast with Dante, who must be read as a whole if we wish really to grasp his beauties, Milton ought not to be read except in fragments; but these fragments form a part of the poetic patrimony of the human race. The invocation to Light, the character of Eve, the description of the earthly Paradise, of the morning of the world, of its first love, are all masterpieces. The discourses of the Prince of Hell are incomparably eloquent.

  In “Samson” he finds a cold and lofty tragedy, in “Paradise Regained” a cold and noble epic; he composes an imperfect and sublime poem in “Paradise Lost.”… Adam and Eve, the first pair! I approach, and it seems as though I discovered the Adam and Eve of Raphael Sanzio, imitated by Milton, so his biographers tell us, glorious, strong, voluptuous children, naked in the light of heaven, motionless and absorbed before grand landscapes, with bright vacant eyes, with no more thought than the bull or the horse on the grass beside them. I listen, and I hear an English household, two reasoners of the period—Colonel Hutchinson and his wife. Heavens! dress them at once. Folk so cultivated should have invented before all a pair of trousers and modesty. What dialogues! Dissertations capped by politeness, mutual sermons concluded by bows…. This Adam entered Paradise via England. There he learned respectability, and there he studied moral speechifying.

  This connection with Dryden, which lasted till the poet’s death, was of only less importance to the furtherance of Tonson’s fortune than a bargain concluded four years later with Brabazon Aylmer for one half of his interest in the “Paradise Lost,” which Dryden told him was one of the greatest poems England had ever produced. Still he waited four years before he ventured to publish, and then only by the safe method of subscription, and in 1788 the folio edition came out, and by the sale of this and future editions Tonson was, according to Disraeli, enabled to keep his carriage.

  Let “Paradise Lost,” then, be called a Vorstellung. But what a Vorstellung it is! That World of Man, the world of all our stars and starry transparencies, hung but drop-like after all from an Empyrean; the great Empyrean itself, “undetermined square or round,” so that, though we do diagram it for form’s sake, it is beyond all power of diagram; a Hell, far beneath, but still measurably far, with its outcast infernal Powers tending disastrously upwards or tugging all downwards; finally, between the Empyrean and Hell, a blustering blackness of unimaginable Chaos, roaring around the Mundane Sphere and assaulting everlastingly its outermost bosses, but unable to break through, or to disturb the serenity of the golden poise that steadies it from the zenith—what phantasmagory more truly all-significant than this has the imagination of poet ever conceived? What expense of space comparable to this for vastness has any other poet presumed to fill with visual symbolisms, or to occupy with a coherent story? The physical universe of Dante’s great poem would go into a nutshell as compared with that to which the imagination must stretch itself out in “Paradise Lost.” In this respect—in respect of the extent of physical immensity through which the poem ranges, and which it orbs forth with soul-dilating clearness and maps out with never-to-be-obliterated accuracy before the eye—no possible poem can ever overpass it. And then the story itself! What story mightier or more full of meaning can there ever be than that of the Archangel rebelling in Heaven, degraded from Heaven into Hell, reascending from Hell to the Human Universe, winging through the starry spaces of that Universe, and at last possessing himself of our central Earth, and impregnating its incipient history with the spirit of Evil? Vastness of scene and power of story together, little wonder that the poem should have so impressed the world. Little wonder that it should now be Milton’s Satan, and Milton’s narrative of the Creation in its various transcendental connexions, that are in possession of the British imagination, rather than the strict Biblical accounts from which Milton so scrupulously derived the hints to which he gave such marvellous expansion.

  I don’t think I’ve read him these forty years; the whole Scheme of the Poem, and certain Parts of it, looming as grand as anything in my Memory; but I never could read ten lines together without stumbling at some Pedantry that tipped me at once out of Paradise, or even Hell, into the Schoolroom, worse than either.

  The description of the garden of Eden, in the fourth book of “Paradise Lost,” is magnificent, but vague. The pomp of language and profusion of images leaves on the imagination no definite picture. You have, it is true, “in narrow room Nature’s whole wealth,” but it does not satisfy, as many a humbler but real scene described with a few strokes satisfies. Such landscapes in poetry, entirely projected by the imagination and answering to no scene on earth, are, like the composition pictures, which some painters delight in, only splendid failures.

  The cosmogony of the universe as conceived by Milton in “Paradise Lost,” though very simple, is very little understood. Nobody confesses to not reading the poem. Many do read it; many more to their own loss, begin and do not finish it; all attempt it. And yet how few know the simple plan of creation which it presupposes, and without a just conception of which it is totally impossible to understand the poem. Indeed, it is no doubt in large part the want of this conception which induces many readers to forego the further perusal of the work after having reached the third book. They are wearied by the very peculiar and incomprehensible movements of Satan on his journey earthward. In what kind of a world is it that Satan, Raphael, Michael, Uriel, and the rest move about? How does it happen that Satan, in going from Hell to Earth, flies downward? and how is it that in the journey he is compelled to pass by the gate of Heaven? Where is the Paradise of Fools through which the poet, in one of the most scornful and extraordinary passages in the book, makes him wander? Where is the throne of Chaos and old Night? There is little use in attempting to read the poem without understanding these things. They are very simple. A diagram or two will be sufficient to explain them.

  The triumph of the Puritan poet was as signal as the triumph of the Puritan king. No Anglican minstrel is nearly equal to Milton; neither the Temple nor the Christian Year will compare with “Paradise Lost.” We naturally place it side by side with the poem in which Dante enshrined Catholicism. Dante excels Milton in tenderness; in intimate knowledge of the human heart; in the delineation of all passions, except revenge and ambition, pride and hatred. Dante has the infallible Shakespearian touch whenever his theme is love; Milton in the like case paints with great literary dexterity and with a frank audacity of sensuous colour which would fain be passionate and tender; but he never gets beyond painted love…. For Eve’s face he has not a word; not one syllable for the crimson of the lip, for the ravishment of the smile. Conventional golden tresses, slender waist, and ringlets “wanton,” which surely they had no call to be in Eden;—this is what we find in Milton’s first woman, whom Charlotte Brontë says he never saw. Against Dante, on the other hand, and in favour of Milton, we have to put the traces of Middle-age childishness, the nursery goblinism, grotesquerie, and allegorical wire-drawing, which are present in the “Divine Comedy.” The sustained grandeur which has made “Miltonic” a convertible term with “sublime” is far above all that.

  How resplendent and superb was the poetry that lay at the heart of Puritanism, was seen by the sightless eyes of John Milton, whose great epic is indeed the epic of Puritanism.

  Whatever conclusion may be the true one from the amount of the public demand, we cannot be wrong in asserting that from the first, and now as then, “Paradise Lost” has been more admired than read. The poet’s wish and expectation that he should find “fit audience, though few,” has been fulfilled. Partly this has been due to his limitation, his unsympathetic disposition, the deficiency of the human element in his imagination, and his presentation of mythical instead of real beings. But it is also in part a tribute to his excellence, and is to be ascribed to the lofty strain, which requires more effort to accompany than an average reader is able to make, a majestic demeanour which no parodist has been able to degrade, and a wealth of allusion demanding more literature than is possessed by any but the few whose life is lived with the poets. An appreciation of Milton is the last reward of consummated scholarship; and we may apply to him what Quintilian has said of Cicero, “Ille se profecisse sciat, cui Cicero valde placebit.”

  The Style is always great. On the whole it is the greatest in the whole range of English poetry, so great that when once we have come to know and honour and love it, it so subdues the judgment that the judgment can with difficulty do its work with temperance. It lifts the low, gives life to the commonplace, dignifies even the vulgar, and makes us endure that which is heavy and dull. We catch ourselves admiring things not altogether worthy of admiration, because the robe they wear is so royal. No style, when one has lived in it, is so spacious and so majestic a place to walk in…. Fulness of sound, weight of march, compactness of finish, fitness of words to things, fitness of pauses to thought, a strong grasp of the main idea while other ideas play round it, power of digression without loss of the power to return, equality of power over vast spaces of imagination, sustained splendour when he soars

“With plume so strong, so equal and so soft,”

a majesty in the conduct of thought, and a music in the majesty which fills it with solemn beauty, belong one and all to the style; and it gains its highest influence on us, and fulfils the ultimate need of a grand style in being the easy and necessary expression of the very character and nature of the man. It reveals Milton, as much, sometimes even more than his thought.

  Who now reads the ancient writers? Who systematically reads the great writers, be they ancient or modern, whom the consent of ages has marked out as classics: typical, immortal, peculiar teachers of our race? Alas! the “Paradise Lost” is lost again to us beneath an inundation of graceful academic verse, sugary stanzas of ladylike prettiness, and ceaseless explanations in more or less readable prose of what John Milton meant or did not mean, or what he saw or did not see, who married his great aunt, and why Adam or Satan is like that, or unlike the other. We read a perfect library about the “Paradise Lost,” but the “Paradise Lost” itself we do not read.

  Klopstock made up his mind to fulfil the prophecy in himself. When he left school in 1745, he had already conceived the plan of the “Messias,” and in his farewell speech on the nature and office of the epic poet, he distinctly alludes to the great work which he contemplated…. It was the most popular subject that he could choose, and as yet no poet had exhausted it or brought it once and for all into definite shape, as Milton had the history of the Fall, to the exclusion of all possible rivals on the same ground. It was the vision of Milton that floated before the poet’s eyes, and indeed he could not have had a better model, for Milton had achieved the highest that could be done for the Biblical tradition. Milton’s “Paradise Lost” stood unrivalled in grandeur of conception and effective development of the theme. Amid Klopstock’s many debts to Milton, the following may be mentioned: the detailed description of hell, the council of the devils, the differences of opinion amongst them, their punishment by metamorphosis, the paths through the universe along which devils and angels wander and fly, and the vision of the Last Judgment at the close of the poem. But Klopstock did not profit half enough by Milton’s example. While Milton leads us from hell into paradise, and thus relieves a gloomy scene by a bright one, Klopstock, on the contrary, begins with the glories of heaven, and then keeps us in his irksome limbo of disembodied spirits till we long for a change out of very weariness. Milton exerts himself to the utmost not to let the interest flag, and pays particular attention to unity of composition, steady unfolding of the plot, and graphic narration; Klopstock, on the other hand lets the thread of his narrative decidedly drag, and accompanies each step of the gradual dénouement with the sentiments of all the spectators…. His poetry is full of the very faults which Milton condemned, and, however much Milton may have been his model, yet his “Messias” is more closely related to the religious oratorios than to “Paradise Lost.”

  The imagination of Cædmon may, in some respects, vie even with that of Milton; but the harsh crudities of the Anglo-Saxon language would have overpowered the genius of Milton himself. Long ages of refinement and philosophy were wanted to prepare for the glories of “Paradise Lost.”

  The dust of the conflict had fallen; and the mountain heights shone out once more from the serene distance: once more be confronted the mighty works of ancient genius. They pleased him still, from their severity and their simplicity; but they did not satisfy him—because they wanted elevation. In his “Paradise Lost” he raised and endeavoured to spiritualise the antique epic. There are many who will always regard St. Peter’s temple in the air as the first of architectural monuments. The admirers of the classic will, however, feel that the amplitude and height of the wondrous dome are no sufficient substitute for that massive simplicity and breadth of effect which belong to the Parthenon; while those who revere our cathedrals will maintain that it lacks the variety, the mystery, the aspiration, and the infinitude which characterise the Christian architecture of the North. On analogous grounds the more devoted admirers of Homer and of Shakespeare will ever be dissatisfied with Milton’s work, however they may venerate his genius. It is obviously composite in its character—the necessary result of its uniting a Hebraic spirit with a classic form. Dante, like Milton, uses the Greek mythology freely; considering it, no doubt, as part of that “inheritance of the Heathen,” into possession of which Christendom had a right to enter; but he uses it as a subordinate ornament, and in matters of mere detail. His poem is a Vision, not an Epic, that vision of supernatural truth, of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, which passed before the eyes of the mediæval Church as she looked up in nocturnal vigil; not the mundane circle of life and experience, of action and of passion, exhibited in its completeness, and contemplated with calm satisfaction by a Muse that looks down from heaven.

  How to speak of “Paradise Lost” I know not. To call it a master-work is superfluous. To say that it stands absolutely alone and supreme is both true and false. Parts of it are like other poems, and yet there is no poem in the world like it. The theme is old; had been treated by the author of Genesis in brief, by Du Bartas and other rhymers at length. The manner is old, inherited from Virgil and Dante. And yet, beyond all question, “Paradise Lost” is one of the most unique, individual, unmistakable poems in the world’s literature. Imitations of it have been attempted by Montgomery, Pollok, Bickersteth, and other pious versifiers, but they are no more like the original than St. Peter’s in Montreal is like St. Peter’s in Rome, or than the pile of coarse-grained limestone on New York’s Fifth Avenue is like the Cathedral of Milan.

  I cannot stay to characterize his great poem; nor is there need; immortal in more senses than one; humanity counts for little in it; one pair of human creatures only, and these looked at, as it were, through the big end of the telescope; with gigantic, Godlike figures around one, or colossal demons prone on fiery floods. It is not a child’s book; to place it in schools as a parsing-book is an atrocity that I hope is ended. Not, I think, till we have had some fifty years to view the everlasting fight between good and evil in this world, can we see in proper perspective the vaster battle which, under Milton’s imagination, was pictured in Paradise between the same foes. Years only can so widen one’s horizon as to give room for the reverberations of that mighty combat of the powers of light and darkness.

  Much of the perfection of the verse of the “Paradise Lost,” both in respect to its music and its rhythmical movements, its pause-melody, and the melodious distribution of emphasis was due, no doubt, to some extent, to Milton’s blindness, which, in the first place, must have rendered his ear more delicate than it would otherwise have been (it was naturally fine and had been highly cultivated in early life, through a study of music), and which, in the second place, by its obliging him to dictate his poem instead of writing it silently with his own hand, must have been one cause why the movement of the verse so admirably conforms to its proper elocution.

  I have said that the grandest of English supernatural creations is Milton’s Satan. No other personage has at once such magnitude and definiteness of outline as that sublime, defiant archangel, whether in action or in repose. Milton, like Dante, has to do with the unknown world. The Florentine bard soars at last within the effulgence of “the eternal, coeternal beam.” Milton’s imagination broods “in the wide womb of uncreated night.” We enter that “palpable obscure,” where there is “no light, but rather darkness visible,” and where lurk many a “grisly terror” and “execrable Shape.”

  Milton’s description of hell and its inhabitants is as detailed and conscientious as that of a land-surveyor or a natural philosopher.

  Long after I had thought never to read it—in fact when I was nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita—I read Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and found in it a splendor and majestic beauty that justified to me the fame it wears, and eclipsed the worth of those lesser poems which I had stupidly and ignorantly accounted his worthiest.

  What a magnificent opportunity for describing the gradual dawn of living beauty was in the hands of the man who did not hesitate to write poetry about the creation! Does he avail himself of it? Does he give us any suggestion of the tender grace of the young, wondering world, the slow awakening and unfolding of all fair things till they reach the perfection of their loveliness? Oh no! There is chaos, void, abyss, emptiness. We wait and watch. Suddenly—hey! presto! The world is made. There it whirls,—round, smooth, neatly finished. There are the oceans with the fishes, the mountains, the trees, yes, and the flowers and beasts.

  In reading Milton one rarely forgets that the hand which wrote “Paradise Lost” knew the secrets of the organ and could turn them into sound at will.

  “Paradise Lost” is the product of two great movements—Puritanism and the Renaissance. Or, to put the same thought in another way, the conception of the poem is Hebraic, its form and imagery are classical. Within the limits of the sacred narrative, from which Milton would not allow himself to deviate, his luxuriant imagination found ample scope for all its stored wealth of learning; and the issue is something far different from the Hebrew original. Few of us, probably, realize how often we unconsciously read into the Scriptural narrative of the Creation and the Fall ideas instilled by Milton’s splendid poem.

  Milton never forgets himself so as to contradict what he has written, though he is often charged with forgetfulness. Nothing is put down which has not its most intricate relations diligently considered and adjusted. Nothing is left isolated, inarticulated, disproportionate, or unsymmetrical. Things easily overlooked by the reader often have far-reaching effects. There is a sort of vitality and growth in the ideas, and every part is essential to the life and vigor of the whole. Herein lies the reason why changes or omissions can seldom be made without serious loss. Landor’s proposed emended edition of “Paradise Lost” would be an intolerable mutilation.

  The first editions of Milton’s works have greatly increased in price. Not many years ago a copy of the first edition of the “Paradise Lost” could be obtained for about five pounds, but now a good copy is worth at least four times as much. The prices vary considerably with the date of the title-page, of which there are several issues. G. Daniel’s fine copy sold in 1864 for £28, 10s.

Paradise Regained, 1671

  After I had, with the best attention, read it [“Paradise Lost”] through, I made him another visit, and returned him his book, with due acknowledgement of the favour he had done me in communicating it to me. He asked howl liked it, and what I thought of it; which I modestly, but freely, told him: and, after some further discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, “Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost; but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?” He made me no answer, but sate some time in a muse, then brake off that discourse and fell upon another subject. After the sickness was over, and the city well cleansed and become safely habitable again, he returned thither. And when, afterwards, I went to wait on him there (which I seldom failed of doing, whenever my occasions drew me to London), he showed me his second poem, called “Paradise Regained,” and in a pleasant tone said to me, “This is owing to you; for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which before I had not thought of.”

  Had this poem been written not by Milton, but by some imitator, it would have claimed and received universal praise.

  Readers would not be disappointed in this latter poem, if they proceeded to a perusal of it with a proper preconception of the kind of interest intended to be excited in that admirable work. In its kind it is the most perfect poem extant, though its kind may be inferior in interest—being in its essence didactic—to that other sort, in which instruction is conveyed more effectively, because less directly, in connection with stronger and more pleasurable emotions, and thereby in a closer affinity with acton. But might we not as rationally object to an accomplished woman’s conversing, however agreeably, because it has happened that we have received a keener pleasure from her singing to the harp?

  That Milton was mistaken in preferring this work, excellent as it is, to the “Paradise Lost,” we readily admit. But we are sure that the superiority of the “Paradise Lost” to the “Paradise Regained” is not more decided, than the superiority of the “Paradise Regained” to every poem which has since made its appearance. But our limits prevent us from discussing the point at length. We hasten on to that extraordinary production, which the general suffrage of critics has placed in the highest class of human compositions.

  The neglect which “Paradise Lost” never experienced seems to have been long the lot of “Paradise Regained.” It was not popular with the world: it was long believed to manifest a decay of the poet’s genius; and, in spite of all that the critics have written, it is still but the favorite of some whose predilections for the Miltonic style are very strong. The subject is so much less capable of calling forth the vast powers of his mind, that we should be unfair in comparing it throughout with the greater poem: it has been called a model of the shorter epic, an action comprehending few characters and a brief space of time. The love of Milton for dramatic dialogue, imbibed from Greece, is still more apparent than in “Paradise Lost:” the whole poem, in fact, may almost be accounted a drama of primal simplicity; the narrative and descriptive part serving rather to diversify and relieve the speeches of the actors, than their speeches, as in the legitimate epic, to enliven the narration. “Paradise Regained” abounds with passages equal to any of the same nature in “Paradise Lost;” but the argumentative tone is kept up till it produces some tediousness; and perhaps, on the whole, less pains have been exerted to adorn and elevate that which appeals to the imagination.

  “Paradise Regained” is tedious, though calm and beautiful.

  Milton has no idealism,—not even in the “Paradise Regained,” where there was most scope for it. His poetry is for the most part quite literal; and the objects he describes have all a certain definiteness and individuality which separates them from the infinite. He has often endeavoured to present images where every thing should have been lost in sentiment.

  One of the most unread epics in the English language.

  In this poem he has not only curbed his imagination, but has almost suppressed it. He has amplified, but has hardly introduced any circumstance which is not in the original. “Paradise Regained” is little more than a paraphrase of the Temptation as found in the synoptical gospels. It is a marvel of ingenuity that more than two thousand lines of blank verse can have been constructed out of some twenty lines of prose, without the addition of any invented incident, or the insertion of any irrelevant digression. In the first three books of “Paradise Regained” there is not a single simile. Nor yet can it be said that the version of the gospel narrative has the fault of most paraphrases, viz., that of weakening the effect, and obliterating the chiselled features of the original.

  Of necessity the poem is rather a splendid fragment than a complete epic. Satan and his angels are not cast out, nor is man restored to the forfeited delights of Paradise. One blow is struck in the great contest: the obedience of Christ baffles and overcomes the tempter, who had seduced our first parents into disobedience. Then the poem closes with Christ’s return to his mother’s house, brought on his way with joy by attendant choirs of angels.

  As he grew older the taste of Milton grew more austere. The change in the character of his ornament is deeply marked when we ascend from the alpine meadows of “Paradise Lost” to the peaks of “Paradise Regained,” where the imaginative air is so highly rarefied that many readers find it difficult to breathe.

  The latter epic indubitably shows some falling off in the poet’s powers; the supernatural vein has already yielded the best of its ore; earth must now be the main scene of the drama; the piercing splendors of the poet’s earlier verse give place to something more like grand and sonorous prose. Yet now and then the old inspiration seems to sieze him.

  In this poem there is noticeable a distinct change from Milton’s earlier manner,—a sudden purging away of ornament, a falling back on the naked concept, a preference for language as slightly as possible tinctured with metaphoric suggestion. A portion of this change may be due to failing vividness of imagination; certainly the abandonment of rapid narrative for tedious argumentation marks, the increasing garrulity of age. Christ and Satan in the wilderness dispute with studied casuistry, until the sense of the spiritual drama in which they are protagonists is almost lost. As this same weakness is apparent also in the later books of “Paradise Lost,” we must lay it largely to the score of flagging creative energy. But in still greater measure the change seems to be a deliberate experiment in style, or perhaps more truly a conscious reproduction, in language, of that rarefied mental atmosphere to which the author had climbed from the rich valley mists of his youth.

Samson Agonistes, 1671

  In this tragedy are however many particular beauties, many just sentiments and striking lines; but it wants that power of attracting the attention which a well-connected plan produces.

  We are by no means insensible to the merits of this celebrated piece, to the severe dignity of the style, the graceful and pathetic solemnity of the opening speech, or the wild and barbaric melody which gives so striking an effect to the choral passages. But we think it, we confess, the least successful effort of the genius of Milton.

  I have lately read his “Samson,” which has more of the antique spirit than any production of any other modern poet. He is very great, and his own blindness enabled him to describe with so much truth the situation of Samson. Milton was really a poet; one to whom we owe all possible respect.

  The tragedy of “Samson” breathes all the energy and simplicity of the antique. The poet himself is depicted in the person of the Israelite, blind, a prisoner, and unfortunate. A noble way of revenging himself on his age.

  Johnson considered the versification of these choruses “so harsh and dissonant, as scarce to preserve (whether the lines end with or without rhime) any appearance of metrical regularity;” and it must be confessed there are lines which almost seem to merit a censure thus severe. But modern pronunciation is not the pronunciation of Milton. Many verses, as they are now read by some of Milton’s admirers, would disgust the poet, full as much as his critic.

  “Samson Agonistes,” a tragedy, most elaborately composed, and on the severest Greek model, is uninviting both in its theme and the treatment of it; yet the dialogues abound with sublime and pious sentiments; while, though much of the versification is harsh, and scarcely reducible to metre, the diction throughout exemplifies the full strength and affluence of the English Language.

  The most successful attempt at reproducing the Greek tragedy, both in theme and treatment, is the “Samson Agonistes,” as it is also the most masterly piece of English versification. Goethe admits that it alone, among modern works, has caught life from the breath of the antique spirit.

  From a purely literary point of view the tragedy of “Samson Agonistes,” which, as the Preface needlessly states, was “never intended to the stage,” cannot be said to possess merits commensurate with its historical and biographical value. That it has escaped representation under conditions wholly uncongenial to it, may be due not only to the sacred character of the source of the subject, but also to the circumstance that by composing music to it as an oratorio Handel has removed it for ever from possible contact with the play-house.

  We have now shown that the two most noticeable characteristics of the “Samson Agonistes,” the personal element which runs through it and its dramatic form, modelled upon that of the ancient Greek tragedy; are even more markedly the special features of the “Samson” of Vondel. We know, further, that the Dutch play preceded the English one by at least five years. It only remains for us to show from internal evidence that Milton was acquainted with the language of Vondel’s play in order to complete the chain of evidence, and make it more than probable that the one is the direct descendant of the other.

  The opinions which critics have ventured on the versification of the choruses in “Samson Agonistes” would be sufficient proof that they had met with something not well understood, even if they had never misinterpreted the rhythm. It is not less than an absurdity to suppose that Milton’s carefully-made verse could be unmusical: on the other hand it is easy to see how the far-sought effects of the greatest master in any art may lie beyond the general taste.

  The “Samson Agonistes,” the most Greek-like drama ever written since the death of Euripides, gives us some insight into the passion-seething abysses of his soul, whose swelling turbulence was only kept down by a sovereign faith. Professor Seeley finely calls it “the thundering reverberation of a mighty spirit struck by the plectrum of disappointment;” but though that plectrum struck the reverberant chords into thunder, it was the last sob of the retiring storm beyond which we already see the gleam of blue.

  As an autobiographical fragment, the tragedy is invested with a peculiar pathos. We almost forget at times that it is Samson who is speaking, so unmistakably does the personality of the poet break through the conventional setting of the drama.

Sonnets

  They deserve not any particular criticism; for of the best it can only be said, that they are not bad; and perhaps only the eighth and twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender commendation.

  The sonnets of Milton, like those of Dante, are frequently deficient in sweetness of diction and harmony of versification, yet they possess, what seldom is discernible in compositions of this kind, energy and sublimity of sentiment. The sonnets to Cyriac Skinner, to Fairfax, Cromwell, and Vane, are remarkable for these qualities, and for vigour of expression, whilst those addressed to the Nightingale and to Mr. Laurence, can boast, I may venture to assert, both of melody in language and elegance in thought. It should also be observed, that Milton has altogether avoided the quaint and metaphysic concetti of Petrarch.

  The sonnets are more or less striking, according as the occasions which gave birth to them are more or less interesting. But they are, almost without exception, dignified by a sobriety and greatness of mind to which we know not where to look for a parallel.

	Scorn not the Sonnet:…
	… when a damp
	Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
	The thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
	Soul-animating strains—alas, too few!

  Our author’s Sonnets are of very unequal, and some of very indifferent merit, though the principal fault of the least excellent is the uncouth intertexture of the lines, the ruggedness of the rhythm, and, in some instances, the barbarity of the rhymes.

	Few his words, but strong,
	And sounding through all ages and all climes.
	He caught the Sonnet from the dainty hand
	Of Love, who cried to lose it; and he gave
	The notes to Glory.

  Milton’s English Sonnets are only seventeen in all:

“Soul-animating strains, alas! too few.”

They are so far beyond all question the noblest in the language that it is a matter of curious interest to note the utter incapacity of Johnson to recognize any greatness in them at all. The utmost which he will allow is that “three of them are not bad;” and he and Hannah More once set themselves to investigate the causes of their badness, the badness itself being taken for granted. Johnson’s explanation of this contains a lively illustration: “Why, Madam,” he said, “Milton’s was a genius that could hew a Colossus out of a rock, but could not carve heads on cherrystones.”

  Even when Milton’s matter repels or fails to interest, there is always something in his manner which compels an attentive and fascinated hearing. The personal quality, which was of pure and high self-containedness all compact, informs the language and gives it a magical power. He on his mountain-top had learned from the silent stars and voiceful winds a speech which was not the dialect of the crowd, and, whatever be the burden of the saying, there is a spell in the mere intonation. We feel the spell sometimes almost humorously, as in the rough-hewn sonnet with its harsh, unpoetic, bald, monosyllabic rhymes—“clogs,” “dogs,” “frogs,” “hogs,”—which leaves almost the same sense of weight and mass that we derive from his nobler and more delightful utterances. Among these, it is needless to say, one stands apart in unapproached and unapproachable majesty. The great sonnet “On the late Massacres in Piedmont” is one of those achievements in which matter of the noblest order, moulds for itself a form of the highest excellence, matter and form being, as in music and in all supreme art, so bound up and interfused that, though we know both of them to be there, we cannot know them or think of them apart. Much has been said in eulogy of this sonnet, and said worthily and well; but there is a perfection which mocks praise, and it is this perfection that is here attained; not the perfection which consists in this quality or in that, but which comes when all qualities which may be displayed, all potentialities which can be exerted, meet in triumphant, satisfying, utter accomplishment.

  They differ from all the sonnets of the time, in that they are simple in thought and unstudied in expression, and that they convince us of the entire sincerity of the singer. We feel that they were not written because other poets had made a reputation by such compositions, but because their writer had something to say, and knew that the best way for him to say it was in this form. If he had read Shakspere and Drummond, or Drayton and Daniel, he forgot them in his remembrance of Petrarch, whose form he mastered, at the age of twenty-three, as no English poet since Sidney had done. They do not read like the productions of a young man, for they are mature in conception and severe in execution—demanding our deepest respect as well as our highest admiration. The credentials of a strong intellect, which knows itself and the work it has to do, their gravity is Shaksperean. They hear a weight of thought which had never before laid upon the English sonnet, and they bear it lightly as a flower.

  Hallam and certain other writers have declared themselves unable to reconcile their judgment to the frequent violation of the legitimate structure in Milton’s sonnets. It is true that the pause between the major and minor portions of the sonnet (so uniformly observed in the best Italian examples) is not to be found in Milton, but the rhyme-scheme is always faultlessly in conformity with the most rigid rule, and the sonnets, even where they link themselves together—as in the cases of the two divorce sonnets and the two sonnets on his blindness—stand alone in self-centred unity, and never become sonnet stanzas. The serious divergence favoured by Milton in his practice of running octave into sestet was clearly the result of a deliberate conviction that the sonnet in his hands was too short a poem to be broken into halves, and hence his sonnets, each done in a breath as to metrical flow, possess the intellectual unity of oneness of conception, at the same time that they are devoid of the twofold metrical and intellectual unity which comes of the rounded perfectness of linked and contrasted parts. Much may be said for the beauty of the sonnet structure adopted by Milton, and indeed the model has been so much in requisition in recent years, that it appears to merit the distinct nomenclature which, in the index of metrical groups, I have ventured to give it.

  Some of Milton’s most famous sonnets were never published in his lifetime. They were not even printed until 1694, and then from copies which had been circulating from hand to hand in manuscript. It was not until 1753 that the text was published from the originals. These at once made it plain that the variations which had crept in were, with one possible exception, variations for the worse, and, in some instances, grossly for the worse.

  His sonnets were no chamber exercises: each owed its inspiration to a real occasion, and that inspiration of reality lifted it high above mere simulation of the Horatian mode.

On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, 1629

  The “Ode on the Nativity,” far less popular than most of the poetry of Milton, is perhaps the finest in the English language. A grandeur, a simplicity, a breadth of manner, an imagination at once elevated and restrained by the subject, reign throughout it. If Pindar is a model of lyric poetry, it would be hard to name any other ode so truly Pindaric; but more has naturally been derived from the Scriptures. Of the other short poems, that on the death of the Marchioness of Westminister deserves particular mention.

  The most distinct foreshadowing of Milton’s great epic poem, and of his own independent genius, is an earlier poem—“The Hymn of the Nativity”—which gives the poet the fame of having composed almost in his youth the earliest of the great English odes, the like of which had not, I believe, been heard, since Pindar, two thousand years before, had struck the lyre for assembled Greece. It is a lyric that might have burst from that religious bard of paganism, could he have had prophetic vision of the Advent. It is a poem that revealed a new mastery of English versification, disciplined afterward to such power in the blank verse of “Paradise Lost.” Nothing in the way of meter can be grander than some of the transitions from the gentle music of the quiet passages to the passionate parts, and their deep reverberating lines that seem to go echoing on, spiritually sounding, long after they are heard no more.

  Show me one who delights in the “Hymn on the Nativity,” and I will show you one who may never indeed be a singer in this world, but who is already a listener to the best.

  When, at the close of 1629, Milton began his “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” he was still closely imitating the form of these favourites of his, the Fletchers, until the fifth stanza was reached, and then he burst away in a magnificent measure of his own, pouring forth that hymn which carried elaborate lyrical writing higher than it had ever been taken before in England.

  The “Hymn” may be reckoned the first fully opened flower of Milton’s poetic springtime…. It would be difficult to find a poem that would better exemplify certain of the characteristics of a lyric poem than does the “Hymn on the Nativity.” The religious fervor of the young poet informs every stanza of the poem; the pictures are painted for their dynamic emotional value only; the language is adorned with “rich and various gems” of expression; the sentiment is elevated; the metrical form is graceful and harmonious with the thought.

L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, 1633

  I have heard a very judicious critic say, that he had an higher idea of Milton’s style in poetry from the two following poems, than from his “Paradise Lost.” It is certain the imagination shewn in them is correct and strong. The introduction to both in irregular measure is borrowed from the Italians, and hurts an English ear.

  Of all the English poems in the descriptive style, the richest and most remarkable are, Milton’s “Allegro” and “Penseroso.” The collection of gay images on the one hand, and of melancholy ones on the other, exhibited in these to small, but inimitably fine poems, are as exquisite as can be conceived. They are, indeed, the storehouse whence many succeeding poets have enriched their descriptions of similar subjects; and they alone are sufficient for illustrating the observations which I made, concerning the proper selection of circumstances in descriptive writing.

  We find nowhere in his writings that whining sensibility and exaggeration of morbid feeling, which makes so much of modern poetry effeminating. If he is not gay, he is not spirit-broken. His “L’Allegro” proves, that he understood thoroughly the bright and joyous aspects of nature; and in his “Penseroso,” where he was tempted to accumulate images of gloom, we learn, that the saddest views which he took of creation, are such as inspire only pensive musing or lofty contemplation.

  There can be little doubt as to which of the two characters he portrays was after Milton’s own heart. He portrays “L’Allegro” with much skill and excellence; but he cannot feign with him the sympathy he genuinely feels with the other; into his portrait of “Il Penseroso” he throws himself, so as to speak, with all his soul.

  He strictly meditated the Muse, and she was not thankless, for she crystallized the morning dew of his genius into those exquisite jewels in the ears of antiquity, “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.”

  As for “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” who shall praise them fitly? They are among the few things about which there is no difference of opinion, which are as delightful to childhood as to criticism, to youth as to age. To dwell on their technical excellences (the chief of which is the unerring precision with which the catalectic and acatalectic lines are arranged and interchanged) has a certain air of impertinence about it. Even a critical King Alfonso El Sabio could hardly think it possible that Milton might have taken a hint here, although some persons have, it seems, been disturbed because skylarks do not come to the window, just as others are troubled because the flowers in “Lycidas” do not grow at the same time, and because they think they could see stars through the “star-proof” trees of the “Arcades.”

  Of course Milton’s “Il Penseroso” and “L’Allegro” have far more value even as country poems than hundreds of more literal transcripts. From a literary point of view indeed the juxtapositions of half a dozen epithets alone would prove the genius of the writer. But there are no sharp outlines; the scholar pauses in his walk to peer across the watered flat, or raises his eyes from his book to see the quiver of leaves upon the sunlit wall; he notes an effect it may be; but his images do not come like treasures lavished from a secret storehouse of memory.

  At the time these two poems were written, they stood at the high-water mark of English poetry. In their sphere they have never been excelled. In spite of little inaccuracies of description (for Milton was too much in love with books to be a close observer of nature), we find nowhere else such an exquisite delineation of country life and country scenes. These idyls are the more remarkable because their light, joyous spirit stands in strong contrast with the elevation, dignity, and austerity of his other poems.

  The language of these two little masterpieces has been the despair of poets. It is not that it is so beautiful, for others have equaled or excelled it in the mere conjuring power of suggestion; but that it is, as a French critic has finely said, so just in its beauty. The means are exquisitely proportioned to the end. The speech incarnates the thought as easily, as satisfyingly, as the muscles of a Phidian youth incarnate the motor-impulse of his brain. Always fruition is just gently touched. To the connoisseur in language there is a sensation of almost physical soothing in its perfect poise and play.

Latin Poems

  I know not where the scholars of the continent could have gone for more beautiful specimens of modern poetry than his “First Elegy,” and the “Address to his Father.”

  Milton, like most of the learned men of the age, wrote in Latin both in prose and verse. The former will, we believe, bear a comparison with any Latin prose of the time, unless we should think that of the natives of the countries which speak languages derived from the Latin to be excepted; as a modern Latin poet, critics are disposed to assign him a place in the first rank. It is not unworthy of notice, that while in English prose he delighted in long and involving sentences, his Latin periods are not very long nor much involved.

  It is perhaps sufficient to say that critics of such different times, tempers, and attitude towards their subject as Johnson and the late Rector of Lincoln,—critics who agree in nothing except literary competence,—are practically at one as to the remarkable excellence of Milton’s Latin verse at its best. It is little read now, but it is a pity that any one who can read Latin should allow himself to be ignorant of at least the beautiful “Epitaphium Damonis” on the poet’s friend, Charles Diodati.

  The “Epitaphium Damonis” is the best, and—except for a few fragments—the last of Milton’s Latin poems. His Latin verse surpassed that of his contemporaries, not so much in scholarly elegance as in force of expression. To him Latin is almost a living language.

  As to the artistic qualities of this poetry, it would not be profitable to speak here at length. In the main they are qualities of delicacy and felicitousness rather than of strength. They hear a relation to Milton’s later English poetry roughly analogous to that which Tennyson’s early lyrical experiments bear to his adult work. In them Milton learned his trade of poet, at least on its technical and imitative side. The habit of assimilation, the power to freight his lines with the accumulated riches of past thought, we see here in the making, and we see also how the habit of conveying commonplace thought in a sonorous and magniloquent medium fostered that large Miltonic diction, which was so noble in Milton’s own hands, and so intolerably hollow in the hands of his eighteenth-century imitators. It would be wrong, however, to think of these poems as consciously disciplinary. When they were written, the chances seemed even that Milton’s main work as a poet would be in Latin rather than in English; they represent sincere creative effort, and offer many rare intrinsic beauties in spite of their immaturity.

Prose Writings

  His prose writings disagreeable, though not altogether defective in genius.

  “Our language,” says Addison, “sunk under him.” But the truth is, that, both in prose and verse, he had formed his style by a perverse and pedantick principle. He was desirous to use English words with foreign idiom. This in all his prose is discovered and condemned; for there judgement operates freely, neither softened by the beauty nor awed by the dignity of his thoughts; but such is the power of his poetry, that his call is obeyed without resistance, the reader feels himself in captivity to a higher and nobler mind, and criticism sinks in admiration.

  Dr. Johnson endeavoured to give an air of dignity and novelty to his diction by affecting the order of words usual in poetry. Milton’s prose has not only this drawback, but it has also the disadvantage of being formed on a classical model. It is like a fine translation from the Latin; and, indeed, he wrote originally in Latin…. Milton’s prose-style savours too much of poetry, and, as I have already hinted, of an imitation of the Latin.

  It is to be regretted that the prose writings of Milton should, in our time, be so little read. As compositions, they deserve the attention of every man who wishes to become acquainted with the full power of the English language. They abound with passages, compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of cloth of gold. The style is stiff, with gorgeous embroidery. Not even in the earlier books of the “Paradise Lost” has he ever risen higher than in those parts of his controversial works, in which his feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of devotional and lyric rapture. It is, to borrow his own majestic language, “a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies.”

  In many passages of his polemics there is an intensity of eloquence that seems to fuse the multitude of his thoughts, and send them glowing white, from the crucible of his mind into the mind of the reader, scarcely able to contain them in the mould of his narrower conception. We find also an impetuosity and impatience in Milton’s prose which never occurs in his verse. The vehemence of his argument, whether as an advocate or an accuser, carries him out of himself, in acrimonious invective or rapturous panegyric.

  His prose was no “cool element:” most often it sparkles and scathes like liquid metal, yet softens here and there, and spreads out into calmer, milder passages, stamped with an inexpressible poetic loveliness.

  The Prose Writings of Milton, inspired by stirring events amid which they were written, form his contribution to the literature of freedom. To them were given the matured powers of a mind enriched by varied studies, and ripened by meditation. They form the labors of his life, grand in thought and expression, as the poetic recreations of his earlier and later years are sublime and beautiful. In them his opinions, character, motives and conduct are portrayed with singular fidelity.

  The expression is not too strong. There are moments when, shaking from him the dust of his arguments, the poet bursts suddenly forth, and bears us away in a torrent of incomparable eloquence. We get, not the phrase of the orator, but the glow of the poet, a flood of images poured around his arid theme, a rushing flight carrying us above his paltry controversies. The polemical writings of Milton are filled with such beauties. The prayer which concludes the treatise on Reformation in England, the praise of zeal in the “Apology for Smectymnus,” the portrait of Cromwell in the “Second Defense of the English People,” and, finally, the whole tract on the “Liberty of Unlicensed Printing” from beginning to end, are some of the most memorable pages in English literature, and some of the most characteristic products of the genius of Milton.

  Marvellous as are Milton’s prose works, they are, especially the treatise on Divorce, lacking in lofty rationality and consistency of argument. The poet is revealed in the splendour of occasional thoughts and in passages of noble eloquence; but the imagination has not blended with the understanding so as to give insight, comprehension, and light to the general train of reasoning.

  Concerning Milton’s style the most diverse opinions have been pronounced. Everything depends upon the point of view. Rich and powerful it is undeniably, coming from such a master of words, and yields in the highest degree the pleasure of luxurious expression. But the student need hardly be warned that Milton’s prose is to be enjoyed without being imitated: for modern purposes the language and idiom are too stiffly Latinised, and the imagery too fantastic. Further, for a work of controversy the style is too ornate, too unmethodical, and too coarsely vituperative to have much convincing or converting power. In Milton still more than in Taylor the application is lost in the gorgeous splendour of words and imagery, and all but decided adherents are repelled by the unmeasured discharge of abuse and ridicule.

  Jeremy Taylor’s prose is poetical prose. Milton’s prose is not poetical prose, but a different thing, the prose of a poet; not like Taylor’s, loaded with imagery on the outside; but coloured by imagination from within. Milton is the first English writer who, possessing in the ancient models a standard of the effect which could be produced by choice of words, set himself to the conscious study of our native tongue with a firm faith in its as yet undeveloped powers as an instrument of thought.

  Looking upon the life of Milton the politician merely as a disastrous and humiliating episode in the life of Milton the poet, Mr. Pattison cannot be expected to entertain the idea that the poem is in any sense the work of the politician. Yet we cannot help thinking that the tension and elevation which Milton’s nature had undergone in the mighty struggle, together with the heroic dedication of his faculties to the most serious objects, must have had not a little to do both with the final choice of his subject and with the tone of his poem. “The great Puritan epic” could hardly have been written by any one but a militant Puritan.

  Milton, when, as he said, he wished “to soar a little,” had a magnificent abundance of words at his command, and at times he broke out into rich poetical prose. But when he had to write some plain description, his prose lumbered as clumsily as a heavy cart over rough paving-stones.

  The passages which diversify and relieve his prose works are far more beautiful in their kind than anything to be found elsewhere in English prose…. There is no English prose author whose prose is so constantly racy with such a distinct and varied savour as Milton’s. It is hardly possible to open him anywhere after the fashion of the Sortes Virgilianæ without lighting on a line or a couple of lines, which for the special purpose it is impossible to improve. And it might be contended with some plausibility that this abundance of jewels, or purple patches, brings into rather unfair prominence the slips of grammar and taste, the inequalities of thought, the deplorable attempts to be funny, the rude outbursts of bargee invective, which also occur so numerously. One other peculiarity, or rather one result of these peculiarities, remains to be noticed; and that is that Milton’s prose is essentially inimitable. It would be difficult even to caricature or to parody it; and to imitate it as his verse, at least his later verse, has been so often imitated, is simply impossible.

  Were Milton, in his diction, more like Bunyan and less like Browne and Burton, the inherent worth of his prose would at once give it power and currency. Instead of this we note harsh inversions and cumbrous constructions. Our attention is called, at every point, rather to the earlier and cruder forms of English than to its more modern improvements. It is thus that Pattison properly speaks of “the absence of construction” by which he means—of clear construction. He adds, “Milton does not seem to have any notion of what a period means. He leaves off, not when the sense closes but when he is out of breath.” There is truth in this. Not a few of those passages so often quoted by critics as examples of clear and elegant English, are hopelessly involved and must be annotated and explained in order to be readable. Milton would have presented a clear diction and structure had he known “small Latin” and given full expression to his English speech.

  The incoherence and awkwardness of humanistic prose in England reach their climax in some of Milton’s cumbrous periods. Sentence, sub-sentence, parenthesis, qualifying clause, are only kept together by a liberal expenditure of what may be described as verbal hooks and eyes.

  No writings are more unequal, but few will deny that they contain some of the grandest and stateliest passages in the English language.

  To Milton prose was an unnatural medium, which he never subdued to his purposes. As a prose writer he commands admiration only where he enlists sympathy. He used the weapon provided for him by his age with consummate power; but it was a weapon which he seized as he found it, which owed its force to the arm that wielded it, and which he left with no sharpness added to its temper, no new polish to its surface, no new facility in its contrivance.

  Milton’s colloquial sallies are at times such as might be expected from an excessive familiarity with epistolary Latin, at other times they are the efforts of a forced sportiveness too grim to be altogether agreeable. But even in these, and how infinitely more in the wealth of illustrations, images, and ideas lavished upon any subject which he is fain to treat, do we recognise the wealth of an imagination which seems at times, within the limits of a single sentence, to master diction and syntax and all the conditions of written speech! To decry such a style as composite is to revive the short-sighted captiousness of an obsolete method of criticism, which was capable of analysing materials, but not of apprehending the power which transfuses what it has appropriated. Milton’s prose, all exceptions taken, and all cavils allowed their force, remains the most extraordinary literary prose, and the most wonderful poet’s prose, embodied in English literature.

  In truth, the influence of Milton’s English prose writings seems to have been very slight. In his attacks upon prelacy he went with the stream, and his voice mingled with the universal shout. When he took an independent line, when he pleaded for liberty of divorce, or, with a heroism of which even he might not have been capable if his infirmity had not severed him from the world, launched pamphlets against monarchy on the very vigil of the Restoration, he produced absolutely no effect whatever. Nor can we perceive that his “Areopagitica” hastened the liberty of the press by a day, though, when this had come about by wholly different agencies, it was rightly adopted as the gospel of the new dispensation: as the newly-discovered Venus of Milo might be made the goddess of a classical revival inaugurated while she yet slept under the sod. The only prose production of Milton to which a considerable contemporary effect can be justly ascribed is not an English but a Latin one, his defence of the English people against Salmasius.

  His political essays, sometimes coarse in expression, sometimes harsh with passion, always suggesting the partisan and the advocate, and seldom the philosopher, were nevertheless powerful additions to the discussions of the times.

  Milton’s prose works are perhaps not read, at the present day, to the extent demanded by their great and varied merits, among which may be named their uncompromising advocacy of whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report; their eloquent assertion of the inalienable rights of men to a wholesome exercise of their intellectual faculties, the right to determine for themselves, with all the aids they can command, what is truth and what is error; the right freely to communicate their honest thoughts from one to another,—rights which constitute the only sure and lasting foundation of individual, civil, political, and religious liberty; the ever-conscious sentiment which they exhibit, on the part of the poet, of an entire dependence upon “that Eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and sends out his Seraphim with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases;” the ever-present consciousness they exhibit of that stewardship which every man as a probationer of immortality must render an account, according to the full measure of the talents with which he has been intrusted—of the sacred obligation, incumbent upon every one, of acting throughout the details of life, private or public, trivial or momentous, “as ever in his great Task-Master’s eye.”

Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1643

  It is a great deal easier to pass by Milton, or to sneer at him, for his great work on “The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce,” than to answer the arguments therein contained.

  If the early date of the pamphlet be the true date; if the “Doctrine and Discipline” was in the hands of the public on August 1; if Milton was brooding over this seething agony of passion all through July, with the young bride, to whom he had been barely wedded a month, in the house where he was writing, then the only apology for this outrage upon the charities, not to say decencies, of home is that which is suggested by the passage referred to. Then the pamphlet, however imprudent, becomes pardonable. It is a passionate cry from the depths of a great despair; another evidence of the noble purity of a nature which refused to console itself as other men would have consoled themselves; a nature which, instead of an egotistical whine for its own deliverance, sets itself to plead the common cause of man and of society. He gives no intimation of any individual interest, but his argument throughout glows with a white heat of concealed emotion, such as could only be stirred by the sting of some personal and present misery.

  Of Milton’s pamphlet it is everyone’s duty to speak with profound respect. It is a noble and passionate cry for a high ideal of married life, which, so he argued, had by inflexible laws been changed into a drooping and disconsolate household captivity, without refuge or redemption…. This pamphlet on divorce marks the beginning of Milton’s mental isolation. Nobody had a word to say for it. Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Independent held his doctrine in as much abhorrence as did the Catholic, and all alike regarded its author as either an impracticable dreamer or worse.

  What gross injustice the world has done him on this point! Married at an age when a man who has preserved the lofty ideals and personal purity of youth is peculiarly liable to deception, to a woman far below him in character and intellect, a pretty fool utterly unfitted to take a sincere and earnest view of life or to sympathize with him in his studies; deserted by her a few weeks after the wedding-day; met by stubborn refusal and unjust reproaches in every attempt to reclaim and reconcile her; accused by her family of disloyalty in politics, and treated as if he were unworthy of honourable consideration; what wonder that his heart experienced a great revulsion, that he began to doubt the reality of such womanhood as he had described and immortalized in “Comus,” that he sought relief in elaborating a doctrine of divorce which should free him from the unworthy and irksome tie of a marriage which was in truth but an empty mockery? That divorce doctrine which he propounded in the heat of personal indignation, disguised even from himself beneath a mask of professedly calm philosophy, was surely false, and we cannot but condemn it. But can we condemn his actual conduct, so nobly inconsistent with his own theory?

Of Education, 1644

  Milton was then a reformer “for his own hand;” and notwithstanding his moral and intellectual elevation and his superb power of rhetoric, he seems to me a less useful writer on education than the humble Puritans whom he probably would not deign to read. In his haughty self-reliance, he, like Carlyle with whom Seeley has well compared him, addressed his contemporaries de haut en bas, and though ready to teach could learn only among the old renowned authors with whom he associated himself and we associate him. Judged from our present standpoint the Tractate is found with many weaknesses to be strong in this, that it co-ordinates physical, moral, mental and æsthetic training.

  There was in Milton’s time in London a well-known gentleman by the name of Samuel Hartlib. He was the son of a Polish merchant, who had married an English lady and settled himself in England. He seems to have had a fresh, bright, kindly mind. Everybody knew him; he interested himself in everything that was live and good; he talked with everybody who had anything to say. Every great city has just such men—we know such men in ours. This gentleman had often talked with the great schoolmaster about education, and was very much interested in what Milton said; and he had begged Milton often, as they sat together talking, to write down what he was saying, so that it might not be lost. The busy Milton at last complied, and the result is that we have a dozen pages of his stately prose, in which he pictures his ideal of school-teaching and gives us, it is safe to say, a prospectus of philosophic education within which almost all the progress of our modern schools has been included, and which it is very far yet from outgrowing. Surely it will be interesting to look at his ideas in the light of modern developments. I know how often practical teachers are impatient of new theories. They do not love to listen to a mere philosopher who sits in his study and tells them what a school ought to be. But remember, Milton’s ideas were not wholly theories. He had seen some practice. And remember, too, that if the teacher’s art be in any high sense an art at all, it must have a philosophy behind it. If we would not allow it to sink into a mere set of rules, and depend for its success on certain mere tricks or knacks, it must forever refresh itself out of the fountain of first principles and inspire itself with the contemplation of even unattainable ideals. This leads us to a brief sketch of the main thoughts which this essay of the great Englishman contains. I am surprised, when I enumerate them, to see how thoroughly they are the thoughts which all our modern education has tried to realize. Here they are fully conceived in the rich mind of the representative man of two centuries ago.

  This tract, often reproduced and regarded, along with one of Locke’s, as a substantial contribution to the subject, must often have grievously disappointed those who have eagerly consulted it for practical hints or guidance of any kind. Its interest is wholly biographical. It cannot be regarded as a valuable contribution to educational theory, but it is strongly marked with the Miltonic individuality. We find in it the same lofty conception of the aim which Milton carried into everything he attempted; the same disdain of the beaten routine, and proud reliance upon his own resources.

Areopagitica, 1644

  It would not be easy to discover, in the whole stream and succession of literary productions any thing more cogent and forcible than this tract.

  He attacked the licensing system in that sublime treatise which every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand, and as frontlets between his eyes.

  Many passages in this famous tract are admirably eloquent; an intense love of liberty and truth flows through it; the majestic soul of Milton breathes such high thoughts as had not been uttered before.

  The most splendid argument perhaps the world had then witnessed on behalf of intellectual liberty.

  The “Paradise Lost” is, indeed, scarcely a more glorious monument of the genius of Milton than that “Areopagitica.” If, even at the present day, when the cause for which it was written has long since triumphed, it is impossible to read it without emotion, we can hardly doubt that when it first appeared it exercised a mighty influence over the awakening movement of liberty.

  All who care for English literature have read the “Areopagitica.” It is the most literary of Milton’s pamphlets, eloquent, to the point, and full of noble images splendidly wrought and fitted to their place. Its defence of books and the freedom of books will last as long as there are writers and readers of books. Its scorn of the censorship of writing is only excelled by its uplifted praise of true writing.

  Milton’s one enduringly popular prose work.

  The right of the “Areopagitica” to rank as best, as it is clearly the most popular, of Milton’s prose works, has been disputed by the jealous admirers of others. The popularity, no doubt due in part to the subject, is also to be ascribed to the greater equability and clearness of style. If he does not soar to quite such heights, there are fewer descents and contortions, and it remains at a high level of lofty eloquence.

  The “Areopagitica” is the high-water mark of Milton’s prose writings. Never again in the years that follow could he write with the same strong assurance of the ultimate triumph of freedom, the same dominant and invincible trust in the divinely appointed destiny of England.

Eikonoklastes, 1649

  Milton’s ready pen completed the answer, Eikonoklastes, a quarto of 242 pages, before October, 1649. It is, like all answers, worthless as a book. Eikonoklastes, the Image-breaker, takes the Image, Eikon, paragraph by paragraph, turning it round, and asserting the negative. To the Royalist view of the points in dispute Milton opposes the Independent view. A refutation, which follows each step of an adverse book, is necessarily devoid of originality. But Milton is worse than tedious; his reply is in a tone of rude railing and insolent swagger, which would have been always unbecoming, but which at this moment was grossly indecent. Milton must, however, be acquitted of one charge which has been made against him, viz., that he taunts the King with his familiarity with Shakspeare. The charge rests on a misunderstanding. In quoting “Richard III.” in illustration of his own meaning, Milton says, “I shall not instance an abstruse author, wherein the King might be less conversant, but one whom we well know was the closet companion of these his solitudes, William Shakspeare.” Though not an overt gibe, there certainly lurks an insinuation to Milton’s Puritan readers, to whom stage plays were an abomination—an unworthy device of rhetoric, as appealing to a superstition in others which the writer himself does not share. In Milton’s contemptuous reference to Sidney’s “Arcadia” as a vain amatorious poem, we feel that the finer sense of the author of “L’Allegro” has suffered from immersion in the slough of religious and political faction.

  It was of no use to retort point by point against the piteous meditations of the imprisoned King; pathos is not answered by invective, and the vulgar railing of the great poet was forgotten, as it deserved to be.

Defences of the English People, 1651–55

  That Mr. Milton doe prepare something in answer to the book of Salmasius, and when he hath done itt bring itt to the Councill.

  When I consider how equally it teems and rises with so many figures, it seems to me a Trojan’s column, in whose winding ascent we see embossed the several monuments of your learned victories.

  Perhaps the King could have wrote better, but I think no man else in the three Kingdoms. What a venomous spirit is in that serpent Milton, that black-mouthed Zoilus, that blows his viper’s breath upon those immortal devotions, from the beginning to the end! This is he that wrote with all irreverence against the Fathers of our Church, and showed as little duty to his father that begat him. The same that wrote for the Pharisees, that it was lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause; and against Christ, for not allowing divorces. The same, O horrid! that defended the lawfulness of the greatest crime that was ever committed, to put our thrice-excellent King to death. A pretty schoolboy scribbler, that durst grapple in such a cause with the prince of the learned men of his age—Salmasius—“the delight, the musick of all knowledge,” who would have scorned to drop a pen full of ink against so base an adversary, but to maintain the honour of so good a King, whose merits he adorns with this praise—De quo si quis dixer it omnia bona, vix pro suis meritis satis illum ornaret (Contr. Milton, p. 237). Get thee behind me, Milton, thou savourest not the things that be of truth and loyalty, but of pride, bitterness and falsehood.

  The celebrated controversy of Salmasius, continued by Morus with Milton—the first the pleader of King Charles, the latter the advocate of the people—was of that magnitude, that all Europe took a part in the paper-war of these two great men. The answer of Milton, who perfectly massacred Salmasius, is now read but by the few. Whatever is addressed to the times, however great may be its merits, is doomed to perish with the times; yet on these pages the philosopher will not contemplate in vain.

  The “Defence of the People of England,” on which his contemporary fame was founded, is, when divested of its pure Latinity, the worst of his works. Only its general aim, and a few elevated passages, can save it. We could be well content, if the flames to which it was condemned at Paris, at Toulouse, and at London, had utterly consumed it. The lover of his genius will always regret that he should not have taken counsel of his own lofty heart at this, as at other times, and have written from the deep convictions of love and right, which are the foundations of civil liberty. There is little poetry or prophecy in this mean and ribald scolding. To insult Salmasius, not to acquit England, is the main design. What under heaven had Madame de Saumaise, or the manner of living of Saumaise, or Salmasius, or his blunders of grammar, or his niceties of diction, to do with the solemn question whether Charles Stuart had been rightly slain? Though it evinces learning and critical skill, yet, as an historical argument, it cannot be valued with similar disquisitions of Robertson and Hallam, and even less celebrated scholars. But, when he comes to speak of the reason of the thing, then he always recovers himself. The voice of the mob is silent, and Milton speaks. And the peroration, in which he implores his countrymen to refute this adversary by their great deeds, is in a just spirit.

  Controversies like these are pitiful sights. It is sad to see a magnificent genius like Milton stooping to fling those paving-stones of abuse—“rogue, puppy, foul-mouthed wretch”—which come ready to the hand of every sot and shrew in England.

  We fancy we are listening to the bellowing of two bulls.

  Milton’s “Defences of the English People” are rendered provoking by his extraordinary language concerning his opponents. “Numskull,” “beast,” “fool,” “puppy,” “knave,” “ass,” “mongrel-cur,” are but a few of the epithets that may be selected for this descriptive catalogue. This is doubtless mere matter of pleading, a rule of the forum where controversies between scholars are conducted; but for that very reason it makes the pamphlets as provoking to an ordinary reader as an old bill of complaint in Chancery must have been to an impatient suitor who wanted his money.

  The “Defence” is not wanting in powerful expression, as indeed, being Milton’s, it could hardly be; but it bears on the face of it the obvious signs of a work written to order. It has no complete study of government or scheme of political philosophy. It is a robust, but not profound or convincing, answer to a powerful attack. Politics were merged in personalities, and most men must needs admit that it was an ill cause that was driven to accuse Charles I. of poisoning his father, and to twit Salmasius with being governed by his wife.

The History of Britain, 1670

  “The historie of Great Britannie, declaring the successe of times and affaires in that Iland, from the Romans first entrance until the reign of Egbert &c.” London, printed by Valentine Simmes 1606, 4to. was wrote by John Clapham, no very noted author. John Milton (who takes in that period) I believe is more read; and yet even Milton was infinitely better at poetry than history.

  It would be impossible to preserve the charm of the original in a translation. The narrator renders his style as antique as those of the chronicles whence he draws the recital.

  In truth the style of this “History” is dry and uninteresting, and conveys to my mind the impression that, though “revised” by the author in his old age, its effectiveness would have been enhanced, had opportunity so served, by further touches from his younger hand.

General

  It is not any private respect of gain, Gentle Reader (for the slightest Pamphlet is nowadays more vendible than the works of learnedest men), but it is the love I have to our own Language that hath made me diligent to collect and set forth such Pieces, both in Prose and Verse, as may renew the wonted honour and esteem of our English tongue; and it’s the worth of these both English and Latin Poems, not the flourish of any prefixed encomions, that can invite thee to buy them—though these are not without the highest commendations and applause of the learnedest Academicks, both domestic and foreign, and, amongst those of our own country, the unparalleled attestation of that renowned Provost of Eton, Sir Henry Wootton…. The Author’s more peculiar excellency in those studies was too well known to conceal his Papers, or to keep me from attempting to solicit them from him. Let the event guide itself which way it will, I shall deserve of the age by bringing into the light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous Spenser wrote; whose Poems in these English ones are as rarely imitated as sweetly excelled. Reader, if thou art eagle-eyed to censure their worth, I am not fearful to expose them to thy exactest perusal.

  John Milton was one whose natural parts might deservedly give him a place amongst the principal of our English Poets, having written two Heroick Poems and a Tragedy, namely “Paradice Lost,” “Paradice Regain’d,” and “Sampson Agonista.” But his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a Snuff, and his Memory will always stink, which might have ever lived in honourable Repute, had not he been a notorious Traytor, and most impiously and villanously bely’d that blessed Martyr, King Charles the First.

A rough, unhewn fellow, that a man must sweat to read him.

	Three Poets, in three distant ages born,
	Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
	The first in loftiness of thought surpass’d;
	The next in majesty; in both the last.
	The force of Nature could no further go;
	To make a third she join’d the former two.

	But Milton next, with high and haughty stalks,
	Unfetter’d in majestic numbers walks:
	No vulgar hero can his muse engage;
	Nor earth’s wide scene confine his hallow’d rage.
	See! see! he upward springs, and towering high
	Spurns the dull province of mortality,
	Shakes heaven’s eternal throne with dire alarms,
	And sets the Almighty thunderer in arms.
	Whate’er his pen describes I more than see,
	Whilst every verse, array’d in majesty,
	Bold and sublime, my whole attention draws,
	And seems above the critic’s nicer laws.

  Had his education, and first display’d his Parts in Christ-Colledge in Cambridge, which he improv’d by his Travels and his indefatigable Industry to that Degree, that he became the Wonder of the Age, tho’ always affecting uncommon and heterodoxical Opinions. He was made Latine Secretary to the long Parliament, and afterwards to Cromwell Himself; in which Stations he shew’d himself a most inveterate and unexampled Enemy to the Memory of the Murder’d and Martyr’d King; insomuch that at the Restoration some of his Books were order’d to be burnt, and he himself was in great Danger. He was certainly a Man of prodigious Parts, and wrot many Books; but what did most, and most justly distinguish him was his Poetry, particularly his “Paradise lost,” in which he manifested such a wonderful sublime Genius, as perhaps was never exceeded in any Age or Nation in the World.

	Is not each great, each amiable Muse
	Of classic ages in thy Milton met?
	A genius universal as his theme,
	Astonishing as Chaos, as the bloom
	Of blowing Eden fair, as Heaven sublime!

	Verse without rhyme I never could endure,
	Uncouth in numbers, and in sense obscure.
	To him as nature, when he ceased to see,
	Milton’s an universal blank to me.

  I have nothing to say for rhyme, but that I doubt whether a poem can support itself without it, in our language; unless it be stiffened with such strange words, as are likely to destroy our language itself. The high style, that is affected so much in blank verse, would not have been borne, even in Milton, had not his subject turned so much on such strange out-of-the-world things as it does.

  He was both a perfect master of rime and could also express something by it which nobody else ever thought of.

  I have dwelt chiefly on this ode as much less celebrated than “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” which are now universally known; but which, by a strange fatality, lay in a sort of obscurity, the private enjoyment of a few curious readers, till they were set to admirable music by Mr. Handel. And indeed this volume of Milton’s miscellaneous poems has not till very lately met with suitable regard. Shall I offend any rational admirer of Pope, by remarking that these juvenile descriptive poems of Milton, as well as his Latin elegies, are of a strain far more exalted than any the former author can boast?

  Milton was forced to wait till the world had done admiring Quarles.

  The best example of an exquisite ear that I can produce…. The more we attend to the composition of Milton’s harmony, the more we shall be sensible how he loved to vary his pauses, his measures, and his feet, which gives that enchanting air of freedom and wildness to his versification, unconfined by any rules but those which his own feeling and the nature of his subject demanded. Thus he mixes the line of eight syllables with that of seven, the Trochee and the Spondee with the Iambic foot, and the single rhyme with the double.

  It is, however, remarkable, that the greatest genius by far that shone out in England during this period was deeply engaged with these fanatics, and even prostituted his pen in theological controversy in factions disputes, and in justifying the most violent measures of the party. This was John Milton, whose poems are admirable, though liable to some objections; his prose writings disagreeable, though not altogether defective in genius. Nor are all his poems equal; his “Paradise Lost,” his “Comus,” and a few others, shine out amidst some flat and insipid compositions; even in the “Paradise Lost,” his capital performance, there are very long passages, amounting to near a third of the work, almost wholly destitute of harmony and elegance, nay of all vigour of imagination. This natural inequality in Milton’s genius was much increased by the inequalities in his subject; of which some parts are of themselves the most lofty that can enter into human conception, others would have required the most laboured elegance of composition to support them. It is certain, that this author, when in a happy mood, and employed on a noble subject, is the most wonderfully sublime of any poet in any language, Homer and Lucretius and Tasso not excepted. More concise than Homer, more simple than Tasso, more nervous than Lucretius; had he lived in a later age, and learned to polish some rudeness in his verses; had he enjoyed better fortune, and possessed leisure to watch the returns of genius in himself, he had attained the pinnacle of perfection, and borne away the palm of epic poetry.

  Milton,—the most perfect scholar, as well as the sublimest poet, that our country has ever produced.

  Through all his greater work there prevails an uniform peculiarity of Diction, a mode and cast of expression which bears little resemblance to that of any former writer; and which is so far removed from common use, that an unlearned reader, when he first opens his book, finds himself surprised by a new language.

  Milton had such superior merit, that I will only say, that if his angels, his Satan, and his Adam have as much dignity as the Apollo Belvidere, his Eve has all the delicacy and graces of the Venus of Medicis; as his description of Eden has the colouring of Albano. Milton’s tenderness imprints ideas as graceful as Guido’s Madonnas: and the “Allegro,” “Penseroso,” and “Comus” might be denominated from the three Graces; as the Italians gave similar titles to two or three of Petrarch’s best sonnets.

  Of all English poets that ever lived, had certainly the finest ear.

In Homer’s craft Jock Milton thrives.

  The reader of Milton must be always on his duty: he is surrounded with sense; it rises in every line; every word is to the purpose. There are no lazy intervals; all has been considered, and demands and merits observation. If this be called obscurity, let it be remembered that it is such an obscurity as is a compliment to the reader; not that vicious obscurity, which proceeds from a muddled head.

  The fact seems to be, that Milton was dissatisfied with the shapeless chaos in which our language appeared in former writers and set himself, with that ardour which always distinguished him, to reform it. His success indeed is not entitled to unlimited encomium. The gigantic structure of his genius perhaps somewhat misled him. He endeavoured to form a language of too lofty and uniform a port. The exuberance of his mind led him to pour out his thoughts with an impetuosity, that often swept away with it the laws of simplicity and even the rules of grammatical propriety. His attempt however to give system to the lawless dialect of our ancestors, was the mark of a generous spirit, and entitles him to our applause. If we compare the style of Milton to that of later writers, and particularly to that of our own days, undoubtedly nothing but a very corrupt taste can commend it. But the case is altered, if we compare it with the writings of his predecessors. An impartial critic would perhaps find no language in any writer that went before Milton, of so much merit as that of Milton himself.

	Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
	England hath need of thee: she is a fen
	Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
	Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
	Have forfeited their ancient English dower
	Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
	Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
	And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
	Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
	Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
	Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
	So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
	In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
	The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

  What an extraordinary being was this man, whether we view him in his moral, religious, or poetical character! It is almost impossible for an unprejudiced, good, and susceptible mind, which is powerfully actuated with the love of poetry and virtue; it is almost impossible for such a mind to recollect the full memory of Milton, without paying to that memory an enthusiastic homage; a kind of inferior adoration.

	Chief of organic numbers!
	Old Scholar of the Spheres!
	Thy spirit never slumbers,
	But rolls about our ears,
	For ever, and for ever!
	O what a mad endeavour
	Worketh he,
	Who to thy sacred and ennobled hearse
	Would offer a burnt sacrifice of verse
	And melody.

  Milton’s works are a perpetual invocation to the Muses; a hymn to Fame…. Milton has borrowed more than any other writer, and exhausted every source of imitation, sacred and profane; yet he is perfectly distinct from every other writer. He is a writer of centos, and yet in originality scarce inferior to Homer. The power of his mind is stamped on every line. The fervour of his imagination melts down and renders malleable, as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials. In reading his works, we feel ourselves under the influence of a mighty intellect, that the nearer it approaches to others, becomes more distinct from them. The quantity of art in him shows the strength of his genius; the weight of his intellectual obligations would have oppressed any other writer. Milton’s learning has all the effect of intuition. He describes objects, of which he could only have read in books, with the vividness of actual observation. His imagination has the force of nature. He makes words tell as pictures…. It has been, indeed, objected to Milton, by a common perversity of criticism, that his ideas were musical rather than picturesque, as if, because they were in the highest degree musical, they must be (to keep the sage critical balance even, and to allow no one man to possess two qualities at the same time) proportionably deficient in other respects. But Milton’s poetry is not cast in any such narrow, commonplace mould; it is not so barren of resources. His worship of the Muse was not so simple or confined. A sound arises

“Like a steam of rich distilled perfumes;”

we hear the pealing organ; but the incense on the altars is also there, and the statues of the gods are ranged around. The ear, indeed, predominates over the eye, because it is more immediately affected, and because the language of music blends more immediately with, and forms a more natural accompaniment to, the variable and indefinite associations of ideas conveyed by words. But where the associations of the imagination are not the principal thing the individual object is given by Milton with equal force and beauty.

	If, fallen in evil days on evil tongues,
	Milton appeal’d to the Avenger, Time,
	If Time, the Avenger, execrates his wrongs,
	And makes the word “Miltonic” mean sublime,
	He deign’d not to belie his soul in songs,
	Nor turn his very talent to a crime;
	He did not loathe the Sire to laud the Son,
	But closed the tyrant-hater he begun.

	With other emotion
	Milton’s severer shade I saw, and, in reverence humbled,
	Gazed on that soul sublime; of passion now as of blindness
	Healed, and no longer here to Kings and to Hierarchs hostile,
	He was assoiled from taint of the fatal fruit; and in Eden
	Not again to be lost, consorted an equal with angels.

	He died,
	Who was the Sire of an immortal strain,
	Blind, old, and lonely, when his country’s pride
	The priest, the slave, and the liberticide,
	Trampled and mocked with many a loathèd rite
	Of lust and blood. He went, unterrified,
	Into the gulf of death; but his clear sprite
	Yet reigns o’er earth, the third among the Sons of Light.

  The works of Milton cannot be comprehended or enjoyed, unless the mind of the reader co-operate with that of the writer. He does not paint a finished picture, or play for a mere passive listener. He sketches, and leaves others to fill up the outline. He strikes the key-note, and expects his hearer to make out the melody.

  This character of power runs through all Milton’s works. His descriptions of nature show a free and bold hand. He has no need of the minute, graphic skill which we prize in Cowper or Crabbe. With a few strong or delicate touches, he impresses, as it were, his own mind on the scenes which he would describe, and kindles the imagination of the gifted reader to clothe them with the same radiant hues under which they appeared to his own. This attribute of power is universally felt to characterize Milton. His sublimity is in every man’s mouth. Is it felt that his poetry breathes a sensibility and tenderness hardly surpassed by its sublimity? We apprehend that the grandeur of Milton’s mind has thrown some shade over his milder beauties; and this it has done, not only by being more striking and imposing, but by the tendency of vast mental energy to give a certain calmness to the expression of tenderness and deep feeling.

  Of Milton’s mind the leading characteristic is its unity. He has the thoughts of all ages at his command; but he has made them his own. He sits “high on a throne of royal state, adorned With all the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, And where the gorgeous East with richest hand Has showered barbaric pearl and gold.” There are no false gems in him, no tinsel. It seems as if nothing could dwell in his mind, but what was grand and sterling.

  In Milton, again, the harmony of the verse is but the echo of the inward music which the thoughts of the poet breathe.

  Milton was abundantly skilled in the dialectic art; he had a divine intuition into the logic of poetry; but he was not particularly remarkable, among men of genius, for penetrating and comprehensive intellect. This is very clear from his political and theological writings. His scheme of Government is that of a purely ideal commonwealth, and has the fault common to the greater number of such conceptions, that it never could be practised, except among beings for whom no government at all would be necessary. His opinions as to a Church Establishment are of an exactly similar description; and no imagination less powerful than his could have realized such visions to any mind. Nor could these phantom plans have obtained, in the thoughts of a nation, the living force necessary to their action, unless every man had been able to breathe into them from himself a breath of existence as powerful as that with which they were imbued by their creator.

  Perhaps the subtle genius of Greece was in part withheld from indulging itself in ethical controversy by the influence of Socrates, who was much more a teacher of virtue than even a searcher after truth.

	Whom well inspired, the oracle pronounced
	Wisest of men.

It was doubtless because he chose that better part that he was thus spoken of by the man whose commendation was glory, and who, from the loftiest eminence of moral genius ever reached by a mortal, was perhaps alone worthy to place a new crown on the brow of the Martyr of virtue.

  Milton frequently innovates upon the high harmonies of his accented verse with the substitution of quantities; sometimes difficult at first sight to master, but generally admirable in effect, and heightening,—even when harshest, the majesty of his strains like a momentary crash of discord, thrown by the skilful organist, into the full tide of instrumental music, which gives intenser sweetness to what follows.

  Milton was not an extensive or discursive thinker, as Shakspeare was; for the motions of his mind were slow, solemn, sequacious, like those of the planets; not agile and assimilative; not attracting all things within its own sphere; not multiform: repulsion was the law of his intellect—he moved in solitary grandeur. Yet, merely from this quality of grandeur, unapproachable grandeur, his intellect demanded a larger infusion of Latinity into his diction. For the same reason (and without such aids he would have had no proper element in which to move his wings) he enriched his diction with Hellenisms and with Hebraisms; but never, as could be easy to show, without a full justification in the result. Two things may be asserted of all his exotic idioms—1st, That they express what could not have been expressed by any native idiom; 2nd, That they harmonize with the English language, and give a colouring of the antique, but not any sense of strangeness, to the diction.

  It will not be easy to acquit Milton, altogether, of injustice towards his countryman; but if he disdained to mention Surrey, he also disdained to copy from him—both the merits and the faults of Milton’s versification are his own!… Perhaps no man ever paid the same attention to the quality of his rhythm as Milton. What other poets affect, as it were, by chance, Milton, achieved by the aid of science and of art; he studied the aptness of his numbers, and diligently tutored an ear, which nature had gifted with the most delicate sensibility. In the flow of his rhythm, in the quality of his letter-sounds, in the disposition of his pauses, his verse almost ever fits the subject; and so insensibly does poetry blend with this the last beauty of exquisite versification, that the reader may sometimes doubt whether it be the thought itself, or merely the happiness of its expression, which is the source of a gratification so deeply felt.

  He must not be ranked with Shakespeare. He stands relative to Shakespeare as Tasso or Ariosto does to Dante, as Virgil to Homer. He is conscious of writing an epic, and of being the great man he is. No great man ever felt so great a consciousness as Milton. That consciousness was the measure of his greatness; he was not one of those who reach into actual contact with the deep fountain of greatness. His “Paradise Lost” is not an epic in its composition as Shakespeare’s utterances are epic. It does not come out of the heart of things; he hadn’t it lying there to pour it out in one gush; it seems rather to have been welded together afterward. His sympathies with things are much narrower than Shakespeare’s—too sectarian. In universality of mind there is no hatred; it doubtless rejects what is displeasing, but not in hatred for it. Everything has a right to exist. Shakespeare was not polemical: Milton was polemical altogether.

  There is no name in English literature between his age and ours that rises into any approach to his own…. Leaving out of view the pretensions of our contemporaries (always an incalculable influence), we think no man can be named whose mind still acts on the cultivated intellect of England and America with an energy comparable to that of Milton. As a poet, Shakspeare undoubtedly transcends, and far surpasses him in his popularity with foreign nations; but Shakspeare is a voice merely; who and what he was that sang, that sings, we know not. Milton stands erect, commanding, still visible as a man among men, and reads the laws of the moral sentiment to the new-born race. There is something pleasing in the affection with which we can regard a man who died a hundred and sixty years ago in the other hemisphere, who, in respect to personal relations, is to us as the wind, yet by an influence purely spiritual makes us jealous for his fame as for that of a near friend. He is identified in the mind with all select and holy images, with the supreme interests of the human race.

  Milton’s immortal verse never flowed between the autumnal and vernal equinox, but, mute in winter, his song was awakened by the temperature that made the groves, too, vocal.

  The invectives of this great poet against prelates and Presbyterians will perfectly astonish those, who as yet are conversant only with his immortal work, his descriptions of the Garden of Eden, and the piety and innocence of our first parents.

  His verse is the most difficult to read properly of all verse in the language (obsolete or modern).

  The consideration occurs to us that a person of historical ignorance in respect to this divine poet, would hesitate and be at a loss to which era of our poetry to attach him through the internal evidence of his works. He has not the tread of a contemporary of Dryden; and Rochester’s nothingness is a strange accompaniment to the voice of his greatness. Neither can it be quite predicated of him that he walks an Elizabethan man; there is a certain fine bloom or farina, rather felt than seen, upon the old poems, unrecognized upon his. But the love of his genius leant backward to those olden oracles; and it is pleasant to think that he was actually born before Shakespeare’s death; that they too looked upwardly to the same daylight and stars; and that he might have stretched his baby arms (“animosus infans”) to the faint hazel eyes of the poet of poets. Let us think in anywise that he drew in some living subtle Shakesperian benediction, providing for greatness.

  Glorious John Milton, upon whom rested an after-glow of the Holy Inspiration of the sacred writers, like the twilight bequeathed by a midsummer sun.

  Milton was a very great poet, second only (if second) to the very greatest, such as Dante and Shakspeare; and, like all great poets, equal to them in particular instances. He had no pretensions to Shakspeare’s universality; his wit is dreary; and (in general) he had not the faith in things that Homer and Dante had, apart from the intervention of words. He could not let them speak for themselves without helping them with his learning. In all he did, after a certain period of youth (not to speak it irreverently), something of the schoolmaster is visible; and a gloomy religious creed removes him still farther from the universal gratitude and delight of mankind. He is understood, however, as I have just intimated, to have given this up before he died. He had then run the circle of his knowledge, and probably come round to the wiser, more cheerful, and more poetical beliefs of his childhood.

  Those who sit at his feet obtain every hour glimpses in all directions. The constant perception of principles, richness in illustrations and fullness of knowledge, make him the greatest Master we have in the way of giving clues and impulses. His plan tempts even very timid students to hope they may thread the mighty maze of the Past.

  No one can fitly reverence Milton who has not studied the character of the age of Charles II., in which his later fortunes were cast. He was Dryden’s contemporary in time, but not his master or disciple in slavishness. He was under the anathema of power; a republican, in days of abject servility; a Christian, among men whom it would be charity to call infidels; a man of pure life and high principle, among sensualists and renegades. On nothing external could he lean for support. In his own domain of imagination perhaps the greatest poet that ever lived, he was still doomed to see such pitiful and stupid poetasters as Shadwell and Settle bear away the shining rewards of letters. Well might he declare that he had fallen on evil times!… The genius of Milton is indeed worthy all the admiration we award marvellous intellectual endowment; but how much more do we venerate the whole man, when we find it riveted to that high and hardy moral courage which makes his name thunder rebuke to all power that betrays freedom, to all genius that is false to virtue!

  No species of literature, no language, no book, no art or science seems to have escaped his curiosity, or resisted the combined ardour and patience of his industry. His works may be considered as a vast arsenal of ideas drawn from every region of human speculation, and either themselves the condensed quintessence of knowledge and wisdom, or dressing and adoring the fairest and most majestic conceptions.

	Like to some deep-chested organ whose grand inspiration,
	Serener majestic in utterance, lofty and calm,
	Interprets to mortals with melody great as its burthen,
	The mystical harmonies chiming for ever throughout the bright spheres.

  Was the stair or high table-land to let down the English genius from the summits of Shakspeare.

  He was the most learned of all our poets, the one who from his childhood upwards was a devourer of Greek and Latin books, of the romances of the Middle Ages, of French and Italian poetry, above all of the Hebrew Scriptures. All these became his friends; for all of them connected themselves with the thoughts that occupied men in his own time, with the deep religious and political controversies which were about to bring on a civil war. Many persons think that the side which he took in that war must hinder us from making his books our friends; that we may esteem him as a great poet, but that we cannot meet him cordially as a man. No one is more likely to entertain that opinion than an English clergyman, for Milton dealt his blows unsparingly enough, and we come in for at least our full share of them. I know all that, and yet I must confess that I have found him a friend, and a very valuable friend, even when I have differed from him most and he has made me smart most.

  Graced with every intellectual gift, he was personally so comely that the romantic woods of Vallambrosa are lovelier from their association with his youthful figure sleeping in their shade. He had all the technical excellences of the scholar. At eighteen he wrote better Latin verses than have been written in England. He replied to the Italian poets who complimented him in Italian pure as their own. He was profoundly skilled in theology, in science, and in the literature of all languages. These were his accomplishments, but his genius was vast and vigorous. While yet a youth he wrote those minor poems which have the simple perfection of productions of nature; and in the ripeness of his wisdom and power he turned his blind eyes to heaven, and sang the lofty song which has given him a twin glory with Shakespeare in English renown. It is much for one man to have exhausted the literature of other nations and to have enriched his own. But other men have done this in various degrees. Milton went beyond it to complete the circle of his character as the scholar. You know the culmination of his life. The first scholar in England and in the world at that time fulfilled his office. His vocation making him especially the representative of liberty, he accepted the part to which he was naturally called, and, turning away from all the blandishments of ease and fame, he gave himself to liberty and immortality.

  These are the two contrasts which puzzle us at first in Milton, and which distinguish him from other poets in our remembrance afterwards. We have a superficial complexity in illustration and imagery and metaphor; and in contrast with it we observe a latent simplicity of idea, an almost rude strength of conception. The underlying thoughts are few, though the flowers on the surface are so many. We have likewise the perpetual contrast of the soft poetry of the memory, and the firm—as it were, fused—and glowing poetry of the imagination. His words, we may half fancifully say, are like his character: there is the same austerity in the real essence, the same exquisiteness of sense, the same delicacy of form which we know that he had, the same music which we imagine there was in his voice. In both his character and his poetry there was an ascetic nature in a sheath of beauty.

  Take any,—the most hackneyed passage of “Comus,” the “L’Allegro,” the “Penseroso,” the “Paradise Lost,” and see the freshness, the sweetness, and the simplicity, which is strangely combined with the pomp, the self-restraint, the earnestness of every word; take him even, as an experimentum crucus, when he trenches upon ground heathen and questionable, and tries the court poets at their own weapons,—

	“Or whether (as some sages sing),
	The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
	Zephyr with Aurora playing,
	As he met her once a-maying,
	There on beds of violets blue,
	And fresh-blown roses washed in dew.”

but why quote what all the world knows?—Where shall we find such real mirth, ease, sweetness, dance and song of words in any thing written for five-and-twenty years before him? True, he was no great dramatist. He never tried to be one: but there was no one in his generation who could have written either “Comus” or “Samson Agonistes.” And if, as is commonly believed, and as his countenance seems to indicate, he was deficient in humour, so were his contemporaries, with the sole exception of Cartwright. Witty he would be, and bitter: but he did not live in a really humorous age; and if he has none of the rollicking fun of the fox-hound puppy, at least he has none of the obscene gibber of the ape.

  Milton does not appear to have derived any pecuniary advantage from his labours as a Poet. His juvenile productions, and a few other minor pieces, were published for the first time in 1645. His Poems were evidently at that period not more esteemed than many of the contemporaneous poetical volumes of similar character. If we may judge from the fact of those poems being issued without any of those commendatory verses,—the tribute of praise so generally accorded by way of introduction to the effusions of a brother poet,—we may fairly come to the conclusion that Milton was, at that period, comparatively little known in the poetical world. Unlike also the works of other poets of the day, those of Milton are not inscribed to any patron, but are merely introduced to the public by an address from Humphrey Moseley the publisher. The volume bears no indication that it had been even published under the superintendence of the author. The Poems are arranged without much attention to their chronological order; and some of the Sonnets are without the headings that occur in the originals in the Trinity College Manuscript. Besides this, several of the Sonnets written before 1645, are omitted, as also other of his early poetical productions.

	O mighty-mouth’d inventor of harmonies,
	O skill’d to sing of Time or Eternity,
	God-gifted organ-voice of England,
	Milton, a name to resound for ages;
	Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
	Starr’d from Jehovah’s gorgeous armouries,
	Tower, as the deep-domed empyrëan
	Rings to the roar of an angel onset—
	Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
	The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
	And bloom profuse and cedar arches
	Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,
	Where some refulgent sunset of India
	Streams o’er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
	And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods
	Whisper in odorous heights of even.

  The finest and the most complex poetic genius of England.

  Milton put off his singing robes to labour for the State, and between the springtime of his genius and the glorious harvest of its autumn, gave the summer of his life to direct service of the country. He was then the pen of the Commonwealth, the voice of England to the outer world. And in his earlier and later verse, not less than in the middle period of his prose writing, Milton’s genius was rich with the life of his own time, although he thought apart from the crowd, and spoke for himself, royally, with independent power. No poet is for all time who is not also for his age, reflecting little or much of its outward manner, but a part of its best mind.

  If George Herbert’s utterance is like the sword-play of one skilful with the rapier, that of Milton is like the sword-play of an old knight, flashing his huge but keen-cutting blade in lightnings about his head. Compared with Herbert, Milton was a man in health. He never shows, at least, any diseased regard of himself. His eye is fixed on the truth, and he knows of no ill-faring. While a man looks thitherward, all the movements of his spirit reveal themselves only in peace…. The unity of his being is the strength of Milton. He is harmony, sweet and bold, throughout. Not Philip Sidney, not George Herbert loved words and their melodies more than he; while in their use he is more serious than either, and harder to please, uttering a music they have rarely approached.

  Milton was a pamphleteer, only a pamphleteer of original genius. Had he less originality, with the same power of language, he would probably have figured more in the history of the time, because he would have become more distinctly the mouthpiece of a party. But because the weight of his mind always carries him below the surface of the subject, because in these pamphlets he appeals constantly to first principles, opens the largest questions, propounds the most general maxims, we are not therefore unfairly to compare them with complete treatises on politics, or to forget that they are essentially pamphlets still.

  John Milton was not one of those fevered souls, void of self-command, whose rapture takes them by fits, whom a sickly sensibility drives for ever to the extreme of sorrow or joy, whose pliability prepares them to produce a variety of characters, whose inquietude condemns them to paint the insanity and contradictions of passion. Vast knowledge, close logic, and grand passion: these were his marks. His mind was lucid, his imagination limited. He was incapable of disturbed emotion or of transformation. He conceived the loftiest of ideal beauties, but he conceived only one. He was not born for the drama, but for the ode. He does not create souls, but constructs arguments and experiences emotions. Emotions and arguments, all the forces and actions of his soul, assemble and are arranged beneath a unique sentiment, that of the sublime; and the broad river of lyric poetry streams from him, impetuous, with even flow, splendid as a cloth of gold…. He was speculative and chimerical. Locked up in his own ideas, he sees but them, is attracted but by them…. He lived complete and untainted to the end, without loss of heart or weakness; experience could not instruct nor misfortune depress him; he endured all, and repented of nothing…. When Milton wishes to joke, he looks like one of Cromwell’s pikemen, who, entering a room to dance, should fall upon the floor, and that with the extra momentum of his armour.

	I pace the sounding sea-beach and behold,
	How the voluminous billows roll and run,
	Upheaving and subsiding, while the sun
	Shines through their sheeted emerald far unrolled,
	And the ninth wave, slow gathering fold by fold
	All its loose-folding garments into one,
	Plunges upon the shore, and floods the dun
	Pale reach of sands, and changes them to gold.
	So in majestic cadence rise and fall
	The mighty undulations of thy song,
	O sightless bard, England’s Mæonides!
	And ever and anon, high over all
	Uplifted, a ninth wave superb and strong,
	Floods all the soul with its melodious seas.

  Milton was the poet of revealed religion under its Puritanic type. The style and thought of Milton are native to this earnest and extended insight of his mind. From the beginning he manifested the same scope and majesty. He always spread a broad wing, and floated serenely; moving at ease from peak to peak.

	… Milton fills, supreme, alone,
	The Poet-patriot’s shrine and throne,
	With renown each year increased….

  With Milton, Nature was not his first love, but held only a secondary place in his affections. He was in the first place a scholar, a man of letters, with the theologian and polemic latent in him. A lover of all artistic beauty he was, no doubt, and of Nature mainly as it lends itself to this perception. And as is his mode of apprehending Nature, such is the language in which he describes her.

	He left the upland lawns and serene air
	Wherefrom his soul her noble nurture drew,
	And reared his helm among the unquiet crew
	Battling beneath; the morning radiance rare
	Of his young brow amid the tumult there
	Grew grim with sulphurous dust and sanguine dew;
	Yet through all soilure they who marked him knew
	The signs of his life’s dayspring, calm and fair.
	But when peace came, peace fouler far than war,
	And mirth more dissonant than battle’s tone,
	He, with a scornful sigh of his clear soul,
	Back to his mountain clomb, now bleak and frore,
	And with the awful Night he dwelt alone,
	In darkness, listening to the thunder’s roll.

  An ordinary mind contemplating Milton can realize to itself the feeling of the Athenian who resented hearing Aristides for ever styled “the Just.” Such a mind feels a little and excusably provoked at the serene and severe loftiness of a Milton, and casts about to find him blame-worthy in his very superiority—an exacting husband and father, an over-learned writer, cumbrous or stilted in prose and scholastically accoutred in verse, a political and religious extremist. There may be something in these objections, or the smaller kind of souls will please themselves by supposing there is something in them. Honour is the predominant emotion naturally felt towards Milton—hardly enthusiasm—certainly not sympathy. Perhaps a decided feeling of unsympathy would affect many of us, were it not for the one great misfortune of the poet. Nature has forbidden him to be infirm in himself, but gave him a crown of accidental or physical infirmity, and bowed him somewhat—a little lower than the angels—towards sympathy.

  Admire as we may “Paradise Lost;” try as we may to admire “Paradise Regained;” acknowledge as we must the splendour of the imagery and the stately march of the verse—there comes upon us irresistibly a sense of the unfitness of the subject for Milton’s treatment of it. If the story which he tells us is true, it is too momentous to be played with in poetry. We prefer to hear it in plain prose, with a minimum of ornament and the utmost possible precision of statement. Milton himself had not arrived at thinking it to be a legend, a picture, like a Greek Mythology. His poem falls between two modes of treatment and two conceptions of truth; we wonder, we recite, we applaud, but something comes in between our minds and a full enjoyment, and it will not satisfy us better as time goes on.

  In the treasure-house of that great poet’s mind were gathered memories and associations innumerable, though the sublimest flights of his genius soared aloft into regions whither the imagination of none of our earlier poets had preceded them.

  Milton is the most sublime of our poets, and next to Wordsworth, he is perhaps the most intense. I mean that every line he utters, every scene he describes, is felt and seen by the writer; that his poetry is the expression of his innermost life, and that his individuality pervades it. Unlike Spenser and Shakespeare, Milton can seldom escape from himself, but his egotism is of the noblest order. We see this egotism in the earliest poems, in the sonnets written in middle age, and again in his latest work, the “Samson Agonistes,” in which, as in a mirror, may be witnessed the struggles of his soul and the sorrows of his life.

  The greatness of the man was conspicuous in his blindness, for though he was fallen on evil days and evil tongues, he was unchanged, and though he was in solitude he was not alone. Urania visited his slumbers nightly, and governed his song, and found an audience—fit audience though few. The Spirit of Heavenly Song attained its greatest height with “Paradise Lost” in 1667, and, slowly wheeling through the firmament of English Verse, began to descend in 1671 with “Paradise Regained” and “Samson Agonistes.” It reached the lowest deep in the next half century in the Psalms and Hymns of Watts.

  When he talked of the “grand style” of poetic diction he would emphasize his opinion that he considered that of Milton even finer than that of Virgil, “the lord of language.”

  The essence of the Greek pastoral elegy is the contrast of man’s individual life with Nature’s apparent eternity—a melancholy sentiment becoming the lisp of a modern materialist, but in the author of “Lycidas,” the poetical champion of a faith before which the material universe is but dust and ashes compared with the soul of the veriest wretch who wears the form of man, almost grotesquely out of place. Why should Nature lament the escape of a divinity greater than herself from its clay prison? The Greek chorus in the social life of the Hebrews speaking the Puritanism of England in “Samson Agonistes” is not a stranger union of incongruities than the poet of individual immortality repeating the materialism of the Greek in lamentations for Edward King. Plainly the individualism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not know whether it was of earth or the infinite; and this confused judgment made it willing to look on Nature partially as a beautiful machine, its exquisite mechanism worthy of such word-pictures as “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” contain, partially as a pagan god to be duly invoked only in good old pagan fashion, and partially as a perishable nullity destined to be “rolled together as a scroll”—in any case connected by no profoundly real links with man’s social and individual life.

  The first great English poet who is above all things musical is Milton. The distinction of musical from picturesque qualities has indeed been used as a means of defending Milton’s claim to be placed in the first order of poets against those critics who have complained that he does not suggest many subjects for pictures. And we must place Milton among poets whose genius is of the lyrical kind, though most of his work is not technically lyrical—especially if we accept as universal among the greater poets the distinction of lyric from dramatic genius.

	Oh, Milton, singing thy great hymn
	And quiring with the cherubim,
	Thou art not blind, or sad, or old,
	Thou hast no part in dark grave-mould,
	Forever fair and blithe and young
	And deathless as thy golden tongue!
	The nightingale upon thy bough
	Sang never half so sweet as thou,
	And could’st thou only sing to me
	I would be blind that thou might’st see!

  In calling up Milton’s memory we call up, let me say, a memory upon which, in prospect of the Anglo-Saxon contagion and of its dangers supposed and real, it may be well to lay stress even more than upon Shakespere’s. If to our English race an inadequate sense for perfection of work is a real danger, if the discipline of respect for a high and flawless excellence is peculiarly needed by us, Milton is of all our gifted men the best lesson, the most salutary influence. In the sure and flawless perfection of his rhythm and diction he is as admirable as Virgil or Dante, and in this respect he is unique amongst us. No one else in English Literature and art possesses the like distinction.

	O Milton, thou hast only half thy praise
	In having lowered the heavens within man’s ken;
	Thine other, equal labor was to raise
	The human spirit up to heaven again;
	So, underneath thy forehead’s aureole blaze,
	Thine awful eyes are mild with love to men.

  If we were to discuss the influence of Milton in the English poetry of the nineteenth century, we should have to analyse large portions of the works of recent and living English poets. Wordsworth’s blank verse, when it is truly verse, is at times almost an echo of Milton; and Lord Tennyson, far too exquisite an artist to be ever a mere imitator, has in his perfection of form been a true follower of Milton’s spirit. Neither has Milton’s prose been fruitless in the latter days; for something of its majestic reverberations may be heard in Landor, a master of English prose if ever there was one, from whom Milton received most loyal and yet unconstrained homage. Johnson’s rooted loyalty to letters had constrained him, too, to do homage; the last paragraph of his life of Milton redeems all the rest, effacing mistakes and prejudices in the fellow-feeling of a true scholar. He must be an exceedingly bold or an exceedingly fastidious Englishman who does not worship where Johnson and Lander have alike bowed the knee.

  Our amiable Dr. Charming, with excellent data before him, demonstrated his good Unitarian faith; but though Milton might have approved his nice reasonings, I doubt if he would have gone to church with him. He loved liberty; he could not travel well in double harness, not even in his household or with the elders. His exalted range of vision made light of the little aids and lorgnettes which the conventional teachers held out to him. Creeds and dogmas and vestments and canons, and all humanly consecrated helps, were but Jack-o’-lanterns to him, who was swathed all about with the glowing clouds of glory that rolled in upon his soul from the infinite depths.

  Where Milton’s style is fine it is very fine, but it is always liable to the danger of degenerating into mannerism. Nay, where the imagination is absent and the artifice remains, as in some of the theological discussions in “Paradise Lost,” it becomes mannerism of the most wearisome kind. Accordingly, he is easily parodied and easily imitated. Philips, in his “Splendid Shilling,” has caught the trick exactly…. Philips has caught, I say, Milton’s trick; his real secret he could never divine, for where Milton is best, he is incomparable. But all authors in whom imagination is a secondary quality, and whose merit lies less in what they say than in the way they say it, are apt to become mannerists, and to have imitators, because manner can be easily imitated. Milton has more or less colored all blank verse since his time, and, as those who imitate never fail to exaggerate, his influence has in some respects been mischievous. Thomson was well-nigh ruined by him. In him a leaf cannot fall without a Latinism, and there is circumlocution in the crow of a cock. Cowper was only saved by mixing equal proportions of Dryden in his verse, thus hitting upon a kind of cross between prose and poetry. In judging Milton, however, we should not forget that in verse the music makes a part of the meaning, and that no one before or since has been able to give to simple pentameters the majesty and compass of the organ. He was as much composer as poet.

  No other blank verse in the language exhibits such a masterly skill in the variation of its pauses—pauses, I mean, where periodic groups, or logical sections of groups, terminate, after, or within, it may be, the first, second, third, or fourth foot of a verse. There are five cases where the termination is within the fifth foot.

  It might at first sight seem strange enough that even in such a cursory account of those times as this is, the name of Milton should have hardly occurred at all. And when it is further remembered that Dryden revered and admired the great epic poet of England at a time when very few were found to do so, it might have been expected that something should be said of him beyond the mere reference to Dryden’s rather dubious adaptation from the “Paradise Lost,” and to a few scattered Miltonian expressions of his, which it would of course be possible to make. The truth is, that in our literary history both Shakespeare and Milton stand apart by themselves, too inimitable and too spontaneous either to found a critical school or to carry with them any long train of followers. And as regards Milton, he may be viewed as a gigantic survival of the Elizabethan period, more Italianised than Spenser, more of the Puritan Englishman than was Shakespeare. “His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.”

  Milton is a sublime Gothic genius in most respects, though tethered to the heavy learning of his century. In his larger aspects he is no classic poet, in his smaller, as in form and perspective, he falls far short of Dante’s standard. He was as full of Gothic inspiration as the twelfth-century cathedral architects, and in his great poem strove like them to imprison grandeur. He chose to be vague that he might be vast,—to surround his celestial battlements with fog that the mind of his reader might infer still loftier proportions.

  Admittedly and indisputably our highest summit in Style…. He best proves the truth that in poetry Style is the paramount and invincible force. What else is the secret of his supremacy among our poets—a supremacy which no poet can doubt, and no true critic of poetry? For pure poetic endowment he sits unapproached on England’s Helicon; yet, in comparison with Shakespeare, it cannot be said that his is a very rich or large nature uttering itself through literature. He has no geniality, he has no humour; he is often pedantic, sometimes pedagogic. Although his Invention was stupendous, in the quite distinct and finer quality of Imagination, or contagious spiritual vision, he has superiors; his human sympathies were neither warm nor broad; Shakespeare’s contempt for the mass of mankind may be hesitatingly inferred from casual evidences, but Milton’s is everywhere manifest.

	So fair thy vision that the night
	Abided with thee, lest the light,
	A flaming sword before thine eyes,
	Had shut thee out from Paradise.

  In one respect Milton stands alone in his management of a great poetic medium. Shakespeare, because of the vast license of the English stage and its mixture of verse and prose, here stands out of the comparison, and we know nothing of Homer’s predecessors. But no one, not Sophocles with the iambic trimeter, not even Virgil with the Latin hexameter, hardly even Dante with the Italian hendecasyllabic, has achieved such marvellous variety of harmony independent of meaning as Milton has with the English blank verse. All three, perhaps, had a better lexicon—it is permissible to think Milton’s choice of words anything but infallible. But no one with his lexicon did such astonishing feats.

  “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” the earliest great lyrics of the landscape in our language, despite all later competition still remain supreme for range, variety, lucidity, and melodious charm within their style. And this style is essentially that of the Greek and the earlier English poets, but enlarged to the conception of whole scenes from Nature; occasionally even panoramic…. What we gain from Milton, as these specimens in his very purest vein—his essence of landscape—illustrate, is the immense enlargement, the finer proportions, the greater scope, of his scenes from Nature. And with this we have that exquisite style, always noble, always music itself—Mozart without notes—in which Milton is one of the few very greatest masters in all literature: in company—at least it pleases me to fancy—with Homer and Sophocles, with Vergil, with Dante, with Tennyson.

  It attests the native power and superiority of Milton’s genius that he was able almost entirely to liberate himself from fetters which still so largely trammelled alike the poetry and the prose literature of his age. Of this his “Lycidas” supplies a striking illustration—a strain of exquisite pathos and beauty rising up amid the forced and jejune conceits which characterize the verses of his fellow mourners, much like the voice of the lady in his “Comus” amid the cries of the wanton revellers around her. In his “Areopagitica” Milton seems himself carried away by this native spirit of independence; and his utterances, noble as is the spirit by which they are dictated, cannot be vindicated from the reproach of neglecting both the historical evidence and the general principles necessary to an adequate conduct of the argument.

  It is certain that Milton deals with the invisible more than any other poet that ever lived…. Milton has not the spontaneity of imagination that distinguishes Shakespeare, nor has he so large a nature, but his sense of form is more unfailing, and in loftiness of character he towers far above the bard of Avon. Puritan as he is, he is more of an aristocrat, and more of a man, than is Shakespeare. His nobility of poetic form is but the expression of a lofty soul, thrilled to the center of its being with the greatest of possible themes—the struggle of good and evil, of God and Satan, and the triumph of the Almighty in the redemption of man. When this theme grows old, then will “Paradise Lost” and “Paradise Regained” grow old. But so long as man recognizes and values his own immortality, so long will the poetry of Milton vindicate its claim to be immortal.

  Milton’s lyric style is not so purely lyrical and personal; it is rather idyllic and objective. In this he is in a measure the poetic son of Spenser; and he, too, last of the Elizabethans, has a certain turn of lyric rhythm and phrase never afterwards recaptured. “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” are the objective and idyllic presentations of the two fundamental subjective states of the human soul. In these poems all the rhythmical witchery and the subtle beauty of symbolism developed or suggested in the lyrics of Spenser, Shakespeare, Campion, Fletcher, Drummond, and Browne, is taken up and carried into the last perfection of English idyllic metre and fancy. And the “Lycidas” carries on the vein of earlier Ode and Elegy to a like perfection. Through all the concrete symbolism of these poems, however, we read the suggestion of the new ethical and subjective mood of the time, saturated with and subdued to the genius of the man Milton.

  Every page of the works of that great exemplar of diction, Milton, is crowded with examples of felicitous and exquisite meaning given to the infallible word. Sometimes he accepts the secondary and more usual meaning of a word only to enrich it by the interweaving of the primary and etymological meaning.

  Milton is a solitary peak that caught the last gleams of the Renaissance and flashed them across a century.

  That the influence of Milton, in the romantic revival of the eighteenth century, should have been hardly second in importance to Spenser’s is a confirmation of our remark that Augustan literature was “classical” in a way of its own…. Milton is the most truly classical of English poets; and yet, from the angle of observation at which the eighteenth century viewed him, he appeared a romantic. It was upon his romantic side, at all events, that the new school of poets apprehended and appropriated him.

  In Milton, the glorious plea for religious and political freedom is of a haughty antique strain compatible with entire disregard of the welfare of the masses.

  Milton is one of the world’s great minds. It is elevating to have intercourse with him and to follow his thought. Even in his partisanship—if to such independent and positive convictions as his that term can be applied—he is great. In carefulness and self-consistency he can give lessons to every living writer. He appears to best advantage when compared with other men of admitted power. Alongside of Homer he seems a kindred spirit. Bacon’s interpretation of the ancient myths are puerile in comparison with his. His insight into the Sacred Scriptures often shames trained theologians. That his celebrated epic, the “Paradise Lost,” is even now but poorly understood is evidence of his superiority.

  Milton is the great idealist of our Anglo-Saxon race. In him there was no shadow of turning from the lines of thought and action marked out for him by his presiding genius. His lines may not be our lines; but if we cannot admire to the full his ideal steadfastness of purpose and his masterful accomplishment, it is because our own capacity for the comprehension and pursuit of the ideal is in so far weak and vacillating. And it is this pure idealism of his that makes him by far the most important figure, from a moral point of view, among all Anglo-Saxons.

  His fame is now old-established and settled, so there is no place left for the eloquence of the memorialist, or the studied praises of the pleader. I have tried to understand Milton; and have already praised him as well as I know how, with no stinted admiration, I trust, and certainly with no merely superstitious reverance.