of the world, at what we ourselves are, must quench that pride, and turn it into shame.

U.

When quoting Dryden's epigram on Milton, some pages back, I called it stupid. Is this an indecorous expression to apply to anything that comes from so renowned a writer? I would not willingly fail in due respect to any man of genius, who has exercised his genius worthily: but I cannot feel much respect for the author of Limberham, who turned Milton's Eve into a vulgar coquette, and who defiled Shakspeare's State of Innocence by introducing the rottenhearted carnalities of Charles the Second's age into the Tempest. As to his epigram on Milton, it seems to me nearly impossible to pack a greater number of blundering thoughts into so small a space, than are crowded into its last four lines. Does the reader remember it ?

Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpast;
The next in majesty; in both the last.
The force of Nature could no further go :

To make a third, she joined the former two.

As these lines are on the author of Paradise Lost, we know who must be the other poets spoken of else we should hardly divine it from the descriptions given of them; which would fit any other writers nearly as well. For what feature of the Homeric poems is designated by "loftiness of thought?" what feature of Virgil by "majesty,"

-majesty contradistinguisht from loftiness of thought? What is loftiness of thought in a poet, as existing without majesty? what majesty, without loftiness of thought? unless it be the majesty of Lewis the Fourteenth's full-bottomed wig, or of one of Dryden's own stage-kings. For, if there be not something incongruous in these two qualities, if they had already coexisted in Homer and Virgil, what is the prodigy of their union in Milton ? How totally are the characters of the two poets mist in these words! They give no notion, or a most erroneous one, of Homer; and a very inadequate one of Virgil. Milton however is so highly favoured, that he unites both qualities. His "majesty" is not, like Virgil's, without "loftiness of thought;" nor his "loftiness of thought," like Homer's, without "majesty."

And the combination of these two elements, which are almost identical, exhausts the powers of Nature! This is one of the blustering pieces of bombast thrown out by those who neither know nor think what they are talking of. Eschylus, and Sophocles, and Pindar, and Aristophanes, and Dante, and Cervantes, and Shakspeare had lived,

every one of them having more in common with Homer, than Milton had yet a man dares say, that the power of God has been worn out by creating Homer and Virgil! and that he could do nothing after, except by strapping them together.

Nor can there well be more complete ignorance

of the characteristics of genius. Secondary men, men of talents, may be mixt up, like an apothecary's prescription, of so many grains of one quality, and so many of another. But genius is one, individual, indivisible: like a star, it dwells alone. That which is essential in a man of genius, his central spirit, shews itself once, and passes away, never to return: and in few men is this more conspicuous than in Milton, in whom there is nothing Homeric, and hardly anything Virgilian. In sooth, one might as accurately describe the elephant, as being made up of the force of the lion, and the strength of the tiger.

The

A like inauspicious star has presided at the birth of many of the epigrams on great men. authors of them, in their desire to say something very grand and striking, have been regardless of truth and propriety. What can be more turgid and extravagant than Pope's celebrated epitaph on Newton? in which he audaciously blots out all the knowledge of former ages, that he may give his hero a dark ground to stand out from; forgetting that in the intellectual world also the process of Nature is not by fits and starts, but gradually,— that the highest mountains do not spring up out of the plain, but are approacht by lower ranges,and that no sun ever rises without a preluding twilight.

The best parallel to Pope's couplet, for it is scarcely a parody, is Nicolai's silly one on Mendelsohn:

Es ist ein Gott: so sagte Moses schon :

Doch den Beweis gab Moses Mendelsohn.

Which may be Englisht without much disparagement by the following doggerel:

There is a God, said Moses long ago:

But Moses Mendelsohn first proved 'twas so. Far more ingenious than any of the preceding epigrams,— because it contains a thought, though a false one,-is Bembo's on Raphael :

Ille hic est Raphael, timuit quo sospite vinci
Rerum magna parens, et moriente mori.

Yet, neat and clever as this may be, a true imagination would revolt from charging Nature either with jealousy or with despondency. She may be endowed with the purer elementary feelings of humanity. She may be represented as sympathizing with man, as rejoicing with him or at him, as mourning with him or over him. But surely it is absurd that she, who is here called rerum magna parens, she who brings forth all the beauty and glory of mountains and vallies, of lakes and rivers and seas, of winter and spring and summer, - she who every evening showers thousands of stars over the sky, who calls the sun out of his eastern chamber, and welcomes him with bridal blushes, and leads him across the heavens,

she who has gone on for thousands of years pouring forth bright and graceful forms with inexhaustible variety and prodigality,—she who fills the immensity of space with beauty, and is ever renewing it through the immensity of time,should be ruffled by a petty feeling of rivalry for

one of her children; or should fear that the power which had seen countless generations and nations, and even worlds, rise and set, was about to expire, because one of her blossoms, although it was one of the loveliest, had dropt off from the tree of humanity.

In all these eulogies we find the same trick. The authors think they cannot sufficiently exalt the persons they want to praise, except by speaking derogatorily and slightingly of some other power. Nature is vilified, to magnify Milton and Raphael; all the science from Archimedes down to Kepler and Galileo, for the sake of glorifying Newton. In the same style is Johnson's couplet on Shakspeare:

Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign;

And panting Time toiled after him in vain.

What the latter of these two monstrous lines was intended to mean, it is difficult to guess. For surely even Johnson's grandiloquence could hardly have taken this mode of expressing that Shakspeare violated the unities. The former line is one of the most infelicitous ever written. Not to speak of that uncouth abstraction, Existence, which is here turned into a person, and deckt out with eyes; what distinguishes Shakspeare above all other poets, is, that he did not "spurn Existence's bounded reign." He was too wise to dream that it was bounded, too wise to fancy that he could overleap its bounds, too wise to be ambitious of taking a salto mortale into Chaos. His

VOL. II.

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