The Prose Works of John Milton

even of cold praise, would have been more injurious to the critic than to the poet. The Paradise Lost was unquestionably a noble poem: but if it could have been shown to be the produce of theft, the fabricator's proud name would have been annihilated, and the purposes of his enemy accomplished. The hostile attempt was certainly made; and its failure could not have been witnessed without painful disappointment by the writer of that life of Milton, which was unhappily sent into the world under the sanction of the booksellers of London. Of the radical and pervading malignity of this work no doubt can for an instant be entertained by any dispassionate reader, and it may justly be questioned whether, as the writer of the Rambler or of the Life of Milton, Dr. Johnson has evinced more friendliness or more enmity to the cause of truth, has effected more good or offered more injury to the

Here are panegyric and benevolence, of which Milton and his granddaughter are the objects, of as high and ardent a nature as any which have been expressed by Dr. Johnson. In diction and imagery the Scotch schoolmaster is evidently inferior to the English critic and moralist:—but in admiration of the deceased poet, and in charity towards the survivor of the poet's family, the notorious Lauder refuses to be outdone by the celebrated Johnson.

great interests of his species. By a party among my contemporaries I am aware that this doubt will be strongly, and, perhaps, acrimoniously resented: but if a page, like mine, may hope to survive to a distant age, I feel assured that, by the judgment of a generation remote from the prejudices of the present, I shall be absolved from the charge of wounding truth to gratify passion, even though I should assert that the delinquency of the libellous biographer is ill compensated by the merit of the monotonous and heavygaited morality of the sombre and dogmatic essayist.

T. Bensley, Printer,

Bolt Court, Fleet Street, London.

THE END.