which might have been written by Fletcher or Shakespeare; the grave full-toned harmonies of Paradise Lost; the rugged eccentricities and harsh inversions of Paradise Regained; and the cold, uncompromising severity of Samson Agonistes.

Rank. As a poet, he was little regarded by his contemporaries. The old blind poet,' says Waller, 'hath published a tedious poem on the Fall of Man. If its length be not considered as a merit, it hath no other.' To be neglected by them was the penalty paid for surpassing them. The fame of a great man needs time to give it due perspective. He was esteemed and feared, however, as a learned and powerful disputant. His prose writings, in his own day, seem to have been read with avidity; but the interests which inspired them were accidental, while in argument they have the rambling course of indignation, and their cloth of gold is disfigured with the mud of invective.

The poet of revealed religion under its Puritanic type. Paradise Lost is the epic of a fallen cause, the embodiment of Puritan England-its grand ambitions, its colossal energies, its strenuous struggles, its broken hope, its proud and sombre horizon. It has the distinguishing merit and signal defect of the Puritan temper,— the equable realization of a great purpose, and the painful want of a large, genial humanity.

The last of the Elizabethans; holding his place on the borders. of the Renaissance, which was setting, and of the Doctrinal Age, which was rising; between the epoch of natural belief, of unbiased fancy, and the epoch of severe religion, of narrow opinions; displaying, under limitations, the old creativeness in new subjects; concentrating the literary past and future; and when his proper era had passed by, looming in solitary greatness at a moment when imagination was extinct and taste was depraved.

By the purity of his sentiments and the sustained fulness of his style, he holds affinity with Spenser, who calmly dreams; by his theme and majesty, with Dante, who is fervid and rapt; by his profundity and learning, with Bacon, who is more comprehensive; by his inspiration, with Shakespeare, who is freer and more varied: but in sublimity he excels them all, even Homer. The first two books of Paradise Lost are continued instances of the sublime.

Its height is what distinguishes the entire poem from every

other. Its central figure, the ruined arch-angel, is the most tremendous conception in the compass of poetry; no longer the petty mischief-maker, the horned enchanter, of the middle-age, but a giant and a hero, whose eyes are like eclipsed suns, whose ' cheeks are thunder-scarred, whose wings are as two black forests; armed with a shield whose circumference is the orb of the moon, with a spear in comparison with which the tallest pine were but a wand; doubly armed by pride, fury, and despair; brave and faithful to his troops, touched with pity for his innocent victims, pleading necessity for his design, actuated less by pure malice than by ambition and resentment.

Burns resolved to buy a pocket-copy of Milton, and study that noble (?) character, Satan; not that his interest fastened upon the evil, but upon the miraculous manifestation of energy,—the vehement will, the spiritual might, which could overpower racking pains, and, in the midst of desolation, cry:

Hail, horrors! hail

Infernal world! and thou, profoundest hell,
Receive thy new possessor!'

But stoical self-repression limits the imagination. If he was the loftiest of great poets, none ever had less of that dramatic sensibility which creates and differentiates souls, endowing each with its appropriate act and word. He can neither forget nor conceal himself. The most affecting passages in his great epic are personal allusions, as when he reverts to the scenes which exist no longer to him:

Thus with the year

Seasons return, but not to me returns

Day, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me."

His individuality is always present. Adam and Eve are often
difficult to be separated. They pay each
compliments, and converse in dissertations.

other philosophical She is too serious.

If you are mortal, you will sooner love the laughing Rosalind, with her bird-like petulance and volubility:

'O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathoms deep I am in love.' 1

'Why, how now, Orlando, where have you been all this while? You a lover?'2

Or to one who has seen her lover in this autumn glade:

'What said he? how looked he? Wherein went he? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? and when shalt thou see him again? . . . Do you not know that I am a woman? When I think, I must speak. Sweet, say on."1

Eve is Milton's ideal. With her he would have been happy. There would have been no friction. He would administer the scientific draughts required, and she would reply becomingly, gratefully, as he wished:

'My . . . Disposer, what thou bidst,

Unargued, I obey; so God ordains;

God is thy law, thou mine; to know no more
Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise.
With thee conversing I forget all time;

All seasons and their change, all please alike.'

As for Adam, no mortal woman could love him, however she might admire him,- least of all Mary Powel.

Milton could not divorce himself from dialectics. His Jehovah is too much of an advocate. He expounds and enforces theology like an Oxford divine. The highest art is only indirectly didactic. The most exquisite can produce no illusion when it is employed to represent the transcendent and absolute. Spiritual agents cannot be poetically expressed with metaphysical accuracy. They must be clothed in material forms,―must have a sphere and mode of agency not wholly superhuman.2

Character. He was born for great ideas and great service: At ten he had a learned tutor, and at twelve he worked until midnight. John the Baptist is himself when in Paradise Regained he is made to say:

'While I was yet a child, no childish play
To me was pleasing; all my mind was set
Serious to learn and know, and thence to do,
What might be public good; myself I thought
Born to that end, born to promote all truth,
All righteous things.'

No man ever conceived a loftier ideal, or a firmer resolve to unfold it. Amid the licentious gallantries of the South he perfected himself by study, without soiling himself by contagion:

1 As You Like It.

2 M. Taine demands of the poet what is altogether impossible,- that God and Messiah should act and feel in conformity with their essential natures. To reconcile the spiritual properties of supernatural beings with the human modes of existence which it is necessary to ascribe to them, is a difficulty too great for the human mind to overcome. The infinite cannot be made to enter finite limits without jar and collision. It may be justly insisted, of course, that the Deity shall not be bound to a precise formula.

'I call the Deity to witness that in all those places in which vice meets with so little discouragement, and is practised with so little shame, I never once deviated from the paths of integrity and virtue, and perpetually reflected that, though my conduct might escape the notice of men, it could not elude the inspection of God.'

The idea of a purer existence than any he saw around him, regulated all his toil:

'He who would aspire to write well in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem; ... not presuming to sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all that which is praiseworthy.'

Not art, but life, was the end of his effort,—to identify himself and others with all select and holy images. Comus is but a hymn to chastity. Two noble passages attest the conviction which fired him, the purpose which no temptation could shake, and which gives such authority to his strain:

And:

'Virtue could see to do what Virtue would

By her own radiant light, though sun and moon
Were in the flat sea sunk.'

This I hold firm;

Virtue may be assail'd, but never hurt,—
Surpris'd by unjust force, but not enthrall'd;
Yea, even that, which mischief meant most harm,
Shall in the happy trial prove most glory;

But evil on itself shall back recoil,

And mix no more with goodness: when at last
Gather'd like scum, and settled to itself,

It shall be in eternal restless change,

Self-fed, and self-consumed; if this fail,
The pillar'd firmament is rottenness,
And earth's base built on stubble.

The mind thus consecrated to moral beauty, is stamped with the superscription of the Most High. Like the Puritans, his eye was fixed continually on an Almighty Judge. This was the light that irradiated his darkness, and, early and late, on all sides round,―

'As one great furnace flamed.'

This was the idea, strengthened by vast knowledge and solitary meditation, that absorbed all the rest of his being, and made him the sublimest of men. Hence the poems that rise like temples, and the rhythms that flow like organ chants. Hence the contempt of external circumstances, the purpose that will not bend to opposition nor yield to seduction, the courage to perform a perilous duty and to combat for what is true or sacred. Hence the calm, conscious energy which no subject, howsoever

vast or terrific, can repel or intimidate, which no emotion or accident can transform or disturb, which no suffering can render sullen or fretful. Hence the larger conception of perpetual growth, the consequent reverence for human nature, hatred of the institutions which fetter the mind, devotion to freedom. above all, freedom of speech, of conscience and worship. Parents and friends had destined him for the ministry, but,

Coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which unless he took with a conscience that would retch, he must cither straight perjure, or split his faith; I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing.'

Hence, too,- from the endurance of the God-idea, from the fixed determination to live nobly and act grandly, he preserved his moral ardor intact from the withering and polluting influences of politics, which generally extinguish sentiment and imagination in a sordid and calculating selfishness.

Can we expect humor here?-Only at distant intervals, and then with strange slips into the grotesque, as in the heavy witticisms of the devils on the effect of their artillery. Thus Satan seeing the confusion of the angels, calls to his mates:

'O Friends, why come not on these victors proud?
Ere while they fierce were coming: and when we
To entertain them fair with open front
And breast (what could we more?) propounded terms
Of composition, straight they changed their minds,
Flew off, and into strange vagaries fell,

As they would dance; yet for a dance they seem'd
Somewhat extravagant and wild.'

And Belial answers:

'Leader, the terms we sent were terms of weight,
Of hard contents, and full of force urged home,
Such as we might perceive amused them all,
And stumbled many; who receives them right,
Had need from head to foot well understand.'

He was an early

Naturally, his habits of living were austere. riser, and abstemious in diet. The lyrist, he thought, might indulge in wine, and in a freer life; but he who would write an epic to the nations, must eat beans and drink water. His amusements consisted in gardening, in exercise with the sword, and in playing on the organ. Music, he insisted, should form part of a generous education. His ear for it was acute; and his voice, it is said, was sweet and harmonious. In youth, handsome to a