To matchless valour, and adventures high: 1740 Chor. All is best, though we oft doubt What the unsearchable dispose 1745 Of Highest Wisdom brings about, Oft He seems to hide his face, But unexpectedly returns, And to his faithful champion hath in place Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns, And all that band them to resist His uncontroulable intent: His servants He, with new acquist Ver. 1740. 1750 1755 adventures high :] This is a term in chivalry and romance. "La alta aventura," D. Quix; And in Hawes' Pastime of Pleasure, 1554, chap. xxxii. Quarles has also said of Samson, "His youth was crown'd with high and brave adventures,” p. 291. Hist. of Samson, 1632, Todd. Ver. 1745. All is best, though we oft doubt &c.] There is a great resemblance betwixt this speech of Milton's Chorus, and that of the Chorus in Eschylus's Supplices, beginning at ver. 90, to ver. 109. THYER. See also the concluding lines of the Medea, Baccha, and Helena, of Euripides; and also the six last verses of Pindar's twelfth Pythian Ode. TODD. Ver. 1755. His servants] It is "his servant" in most of the Of true experience, from this great event editions; but the first edition has it rightly, "his servants," meaning the Chorus and other persons present. Newton. Ver. 1755. acquist] The same, says doctor Newton, as acquisition, a word that may be found in Skinner; but which he does not remember to have met with elsewhere. I once thought that Milton adopted it from the Italian acquisto. But I have since found the word common in our elder writers. Thus, in a Letter of James Howell, dated in 1646, to Mr. E. P. at Paris: "Much notice is taken that you go on there too fast in your acquests." Fam. Letters, ed. 1737, p. 405. Fanshaw, in his translation of the Lusiad, published in 1655, writes it also acquest, p. 7. But Heath, in his Chronicle of the Civil Wars, fol. p. 402, writes "his unjust acquists." And in Aleyn's poetical Hist. of Henry VII. ed. 1638, p. 130, the word is likewise written acquist. TODD. Ver. 1757. With peace and consolation hath dismist, And calm of mind all passion spent.] This moral lesson in the conclusion is very fine, and excellently suited to the beginning. For Milton had chosen for the motto to this piece a passage out of Aristotle, which may show what was his design in writing this tragedy, and the sense of which he hath expressed in the preface, that " tragedy is of power by raising pity and fear, or terrour, to purge the mind of those and such like passsions, &c." and he exemplifies it here in Manoah and the Chorus, after their various agitations of passion, acquiescing in the divine dispensations, and thereby inculcating a most instructive lesson to the reader. NEWTON. Samson Agonistes is the only tragedy that Milton finished, though he sketched out the plans of several, and proposed the subjects of more, in his manuscript preserved in Trinity College, Cambridge. And we may suppose that he was determined, to 1 the choice of this particular subject, by the similitude of his own circumstances to those of Samson blind and among the Philistines. This I conceive to be the last of his poetical pieces; and it is written in the very spirit of the ancients, and equals, if not exceeds, any of the most perfect tragedies, which were ever exhibited on the Athenian stage, when Greece was in its glory. As this work was never intended for the stage, the division into acts and scenes is omitted. Bishop Atterbury had an intention of getting Pope to divide it into acts and scenes, and of having it acted at Westminster; but his commitment to the Tower put an end to that design. It has since been brought upon the stage in the form of an Oratorio; and Handel's musick is never employed to greater advantage, than when it is adapted to Milton's words. That great artist has done equal justice to our author's L' Allegro and Il Penseroso, as if the same spirit possessed both masters, and as if the god of Musick, and of Verse, was still one and the same. NEWTON. Samson Agonistes is but a very indifferent subject for a dramatick fable. However Milton has made the best of it. He seems to have chosen it for the sake of the satire on bad wives. WARBURTON. It would be hardly less absurd to say, that he chose the subject of Paradise Lost for the sake of describing a connubial altercation. The nephew of Milton has told us, that he could not ascertain the time when this drama was written; but it probably flowed from the heart of the indignant poet soon after his spirit had been wounded by the calamitous destiny of his friends, to which he alludes with so much energy and pathos, in the Chorus, v. 652, &c. He did not design the drama for a theatre, nor has it the kind of action requisite for theatrical interest; but in one point of view the Samson Agonistes is the most singularly affecting composition, that was ever produced by sensibility of heart and vigour of imagination. To give it this particular effect, we must remember, that the lot of Milton had a marvellous coincidence with that of his hero in three remarkable points: first (but we should regard this as the most inconsiderable article of resemblance) he had been tormented by a beautiful but disaffectionate and disobedient wife; secondly, he had been the great champion of his country, and as such the idol of publick admiration; lastly, he had fallen from that height of unrivalled glory, and had experienced the most humiliating reverse of fortune. In delineating the greater part of Samson's sensations under calamity, he had only to describe his own. No dramatist can have ever conformed so literally as Milton to the Horatian precept; "Si vis me flere, &c." And if, in reading the Samson Agonistes we observe how many passages, expressed with the most energetick sensibility, exhibit to our fancy the sufferings and real sentiments of the poet, as well as those of his hero, we may derive from this extraordinary composition a kind of pathetick delight, that no other drama can afford; we may applaud the felicity of genius, that contrived, in this manner, to relieve a heart overburthened with anguish and indignation, and to pay a half-concealed, yet hallowed, tribute to the memories of dear though dishonoured friends, whom the state of the times allowed not the afflicted poet more openly to deplore. HAYLEY. Το Dr. Johnson thought differently about this tragedy, written evidently and happily in the style and manner of Æschylus; and said, "that it was deficient in both requisites of a true Aristotelick middle. Its intermediate parts have neither cause nor consequence, neither hasten nor retard the catastrophe." To which opinion the judicious Mr. Twining accedes. What Dr. Warburton said of it is wonderfully ridiculous, that Milton "chose the subject for the sake of the satire on bad wives ;" and that the subjects of Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost were not very different, "the fall of two heroes by a woman." Milton, in this drama, has given an example of every species of measure which the English language is capable of exhibiting, not only in the choruses, but in the dialogue part. The chief parts of the dialogue, (though there is a great variety of measure in the choruses of the Greek tragedy,) are in Iambick verse. I recollect but three places in which hexameter verses are introduced in the Greek tragedies; once in the Trachinia, once in the Philoctetes of Sophocles, and once in the Troades of Euripides. Voltaire wrote an opera on this subject of Samson, 1732; which was set to musick by Rameau, but was never performed; he has inserted choruses to Venus and Adonis; and the piece finishes by introducing Samson actually pulling down the temple, on the stage, and crushing all the assembly, which Milton has flung into so fine a narration; and the opera is ended by Samson's saying, "J'ai réparé ma honte, et j'expire en vainqueur." And yet this was the man that dared to deride the irregularities of Shakspeare. Jos. WARTON. Of the style of this poem, it is to be observed that it is often mexact and almost ungrammatical; and of the metre, that it is very licentious: BOTH with design and the most consummate judgement. An irregular construction carries with it an air of negligence, well suited to this drama; and yet prevents the expression from falling into vulgarity: and a looseness of measure gives grace and ease to the tragick dialogue. But this apology does not extend to such inaccuracies in the Mask of Comus; which, as a work of delight and ostentation, should have been every where laboured, as indeed for the most part it is, into the utmost polish of style and metre. Milton learnt the secret he has here so successfully practised from his strict attention to the Greek tragedians, especially Eurpides. The modern criticks of this poet are perpetually tampering with his careless expression, careless numbers, &c. unconscious that both were the effect of art. It is on these occasions we may apply the observation, "It is not Homer nods, but we that dream." The Samson Agonistes is, in every view, the most artificial, and highly finished, of all Milton's poetical works. HURd. Dr. Warton, in a concluding note on Lycidas, assigns to Samson Agonistes the third place of rank among the poet's works. Lord Monboddo, still more enamoured of its excellencies, says, that it is the last and the most faultless, in my judgment, of all Milton's poetical works, if not the finest." Orig. and Prog. of Language, 2d edit. vol. iii. p. 71. It is certainly, as Mr. Mason long since observed, an excellent piece, to which Posterity has not yet given its full measure of popular and universal fame. "Perhaps,” says this judicious writer in a letter to a friend concerning his own impressive tragedy of Elfrida, "in your closet, and that of a few more, who unaffectedly admire genuine nature and ancient simplicity, the Agonistes may hold a distinguished rank. Yet surely, we cannot say, in Hamlet's phrase, that it |