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Nec vestri sum juris ego; securaque tutus
Pectora, vipereo gradiar sublimis ab ictu.

Hence wakeful cares and pining sorrows fly;
Hence leering envy with your sidelong eye:
Slander in vain thy viper jaws expand!

No harm can touch me from your hateful band:
Alien from you, my breast, in virtue strong,
Derides the menace of your reptile throng.

But he could only calculate the contingencies, not fasten his sight (if the expression may be allowed to me) on the realities of fu-. turity. If some minister of the divine wrath, commissioned to disclose the vision of our poet's advancing life, had, at this instant, exhibited to him the Milton of later days, sacrificing his prime of manhood to the sullen and fiery demon of religious and civil discord; exposed to rancorous and savage calumny; making a cheerful surrender of his sight to the cause, as he deemed it, of his country and his species, yet afterwards abandoned and persecuted; with his public objects lost; his private fortune ruined; his

k«Anguiferos rietûs," is certainly an inaccurate expression. Vipereos rietus, if the verse had permitted it, would have been unexceptionable. "Calumnia" is, I fear, the property of prose rather than of poetry. It occurs frequently in Cicero, and sometimes as a forensic word; but never in Virgil, nor, as I believe, in any of the Augustan poets. Many of Milton's expressions in his latin poems are not supported by high classical authority,

society avoided; his name pronounced with execration; his life itself saved only by a kind of miracle from an ignominious and a torturing execution; and his old age, more deeply clouded also by the unkindness of children, finally closing amid dangers and alarms, in solitude and darkness-if this scene, I say, in its full deformity had been exposed to our poet's eye in his happy retreat at Horton, the cup of joy would have fallen from his hand; his fortitude, strong as we know it to have been, would probably have yielded to the shock; and, prostrate before the Father of mercies, he would have poured his soul in solicitous supplication for the refuge of an early grave.

But of the world of destiny, as it was passing, one only spot was discovered to him; and all that was unknown was peopled by hope with her own gay, and beautiful progeny. While he passed his hours in converse with the mighty dead, or with the wise and virtuous living; while, unmolested by any agitating or painful passion, he penetrated science with his intellect, or traversed fairy regions with his fancy, he enjoyed an interval of happiness, on which, amid the asperities of his later years, he must frequently have looked back with emotions nearly simi

lar to those of the traveller, who, wandering over the moors of Lapland and beaten by an arctic storm, reflects on the blue skies, the purple clusters, and the fragrant orange groves of Campania.

To this favoured period of our author's life are we indebted for some of the most exquisite productions of his genius. The Comus, in 1634, and the Lycidas, in 1637, were unquestionably written at Horton; and there is the strongest internal evidence to prove that the Arcades, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso were also composed in this rural scene and this season of delightful leisure. It is probable, indeed, that the composition of the "Arcades" preceded that of the “Comus,” as the countess dowager of Derby,' for whom it was written, seems, from her residence at Harefield in the vicinity of Horton, and from her double alliance with the family

1 Alice, countess dowager of Derby, was the sixth daughter of sir John Spencer of Althorpe in Northamptonshire, and married lord Strange, who by the death of his father in 1594 became earl of Derby, and died in the following year. She afterwards married the lord chancellor Egerton, who died in 1617; her daughter, Frances, married the chancellor's son, John earl of Bridgewater lord president of Wales. She was of the same family with Spencer the poet; and had been his patroness and his theme of praise before she was celebrated by Milton's

muse.

en the a

of Egerton, to have been the connecting link between the author and the earl of Bridgewater," the immediate patron of Comus.

These pieces have been so frequently made the subjects of critical remark, that any long suspension of our narrative would not be compensated by the novelty of the observations, which we could offer on them. The Arcades is evidently nothing more than the poetic part of an entertainment, the bulk of which was formed of prose dialogue and machinery. But whatever portion it constituted of the piece, it was of sufficient consequence to impart a value to the whole; and it discovers a kindred, though inferior lustre to that richest produce of the mines of fancy, the Comus. I am rather surprised that Mr. Warton, who, with his brother commentators, frequently detects imitation in a single, and, sometimes, a no uncommon word, should omit to notice, in the speech of the Genius, an open trespass on the property of Shakspeare. The Genius says,

I see bright honour sparkle in your eyes:

and Helena, in All's well that ends well, addressing one of the young lords, from whom

The earl of Bridgewater was the proprietor also of Horton.

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she was to select her husband, uses nearly
the same expression-

The honour, sir, which flames in your fair eyes,
Before I speak too threat'ningly replies."

The Mask of Comus was acted before the
earl of Bridgewater, the president of Wales,
in 1634, at Ludlow Castle; and the charac-
ters of the Lady and the two Brothers were

The readers of Milton's juvenile poetry are under considerable obligations to Mr. Warton; but this gentleman, like other commentators, sometimes employs much perverse ingenuity in making what is plain obscure, what is good bad. Accumulating passages, in a note on verse 81 of this piece

And so attend ye on her glittering state,

to prove that the word "state" was used by our old poets to ex-
press that particular part of the royal apparatus, a canopy, (in
not one of which passages, by the bye, may "state" be consi-
dered as possessing any meaning different from what would be
assigned to it by a modern poet,) he tells us that in this sense,
(the sense of canopy,) is state," to be understood in the descrip-
tion of the swan in the 7th book of Paradise Lost:

The swan with arched neck

Between her white wings mantling, proudly rows
Her state with oary feet.-

i. e. the swan with arched neck, between the mantling of her
white wings, proudly rows her canopy, (her head and bent neck)
with her feet for oars. Having established this sense of the pas-
sage, he very properly accuses the great poet of an affected and
unnatural conceit!!! If this be not ingenuity become mad, mis-
chievous, and dull-I will appeal, from the black letter critics,
to all the readers of taste,

From old Bellerium to the northern main,

from the Land's End to John-a-Grot's house.

L

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