which the heart does not assent. Many of the attractions of Milton's poem are not at all indicated by the general words of Johnson. From Addison's critique, we can learn distinctly its character and colours; we can be taught how to appreciate; and can judge by the examples produced, how far our own sympathies go with the commentator: we cannot read therefore without being made converts, where the comment is right. It is not only in the grand outline that Milton's mighty excellence lies; it is in filling up all the parts even to the least minutia the images, the sentiments, the long argumentative passages, are all admirable, taken separately; they form a double force, as essential parts of one large and magnificent whole. The images are of two sorts; inventive and reflective: the first

are, of course, of the highest order.

If our conceptions were confined to what reality and experience have impressed upon us, our minds would be narrow, and our faculties without light. The power of inventive imagination approaches to something above humanity: it makes us participant of other worlds and other states of being. Still mere invention is nothing, unless its quality be high and beautiful. Shakespeare's invention was in the most eminent degree rich; but still it was mere human invention. The invention of the character of Satan, and of the good and bad angels, and of the seats of bliss, and of Pandamonium, and of Chaos and the gates of hell, and of Sin and Death, and other supernatural agencies, is unquestionably of a far loftier and more astonishing order.

Though the arts of composition, carried one step beyond the point which brings out the thought most clearly and forcibly, do harm rather than good; yet up to this point they are of course great aids; and all these Milton possessed in the utmost perfection: all the strength of language, all its turns, breaks, and varieties, all its flows and harmonies, and all its learned ; allusions, were his. In Pope there is a monotony and technical mellifluence: in Milton there is strength with harmony, and simplicity with elevation. He is never stilted, never gilded with tinsel; never more cramped than if he were writing in prose; and, while be has all the elevation, he has all the freedom of unshackled language. To render metre during a long poem unfatiguing, there must be an infinite diversity of combinations of sound and position of words, which no English bard but Milton has reached. Johnson, assuming that the English heroic line ought to consist of iambics, has tried it by false tests: it admits as many varied feet as Horace's Odes; and so scanned, all Milton's lines are accented right.

If we consider the Paradise Lost' with respect to instruction, it is the deepest and the wisest of all the uninspired poems which ever were written and what poem can be good, which does not satisfy the understanding?

Of almost all other poems it may be said, that they are intended more for delight than instruction; and instruction in poetry will not do without delight yet when to the highest delight is added the most profound instruction, what fame can equal the value of the compo sition? Such unquestionably is the compound merit of the Paradise Lost." It is a duty imperious on him who has an intellect capable of receiving this instruction, not to neglect the cultivation of it; in him who understands the English language, the neglect to study this poem is the neglect of a positive duty: here is to be found in combination what can be learned nowhere else.

There is a mode of presenting objects to the imagination, which purifies, sharpens, and exalts the mind: there may be mere sports of the imagination, which may be innocent, but fruitless. Such is never Milton's produce; he never indulges in mere ornament or display: 1 his light is fire, and nutriment, and guidance: like the dawn of returning day to the vege tation of the earth, which dispels the noxious vapours of night, and pierces the incumbent weight of the air; it withdraws the mantle of dim shadows from common minds, and irradiates them with a shining lamp. As to what are called the figures of poetry, in which Pope deals so much, they are never admitted by the solid and stern tichness of Milton.

The generality even of the better classes of poctry is not the food of the mind, but its mere luxury; Milton's is its substance, its life, its essence: he introduces the gravest, the most abstruse, the most learned topics into his poetry; and by a spiritual process, which le only possesses, converts them into the very essence of poetical inspiration. I assert, in defiance of Dryden, that there are no flats in Milton: inequalities there are; but they are not flats, in Dryden's sense of the word. Dryden was a man of vigorous talent, but he was an artist in poetry: if active and powerful talent is genius, then he had genius; otherwise not a clear perception and vigorous expression is not genius. Dryden had not a creative mind; Milton was all creation: we want new ideas, not old ones better dressed. Dryden thought that what was not worked up into a pointed iambic couplet was flat: he valued not

the ore; he deemed that the whole merit lay in the use of the tool, and the skill of its application. Milton said, “I am content to draw the pure golden ore from the mine, and I will not weaken it by over-polish."

The merit of Milton was, that he used his gigantic imagination to bring into play his immense knowledge. Heaven, Hell, Chaos, and the Earth, are stupendous subjects of contemplation: three of them we can conceive only by the strength of imagination; the fourth is partly exposed to our senses, but can be only dimly and partially viewed except through the same power. Who then shall dare to say, that the genius most fitted to delineate and illustrate these shadowy and evanescent wonders, and who has executed this work in a manner exceeding all human hope, has not performed the most instructive, as well as the most delightful of tasks? and who shall dare to deny that such a production ought to be made the universal study of the nation which brought it forth?

Before such a performance all technical beauties sink to nothing. The question is,-are the ideas mighty, and just, and authorised; and are they adequately expressed? If this is admitted, then ought not every one to read this poem next to the Bible? So thought Bishop Newton. But Johnson has the effrontery to assert, that though it may be read as a duty, it can give no pleasure: for this, Newton seems to have pronounced by anticipation the stigma due to him. Is any intellectual delight equal to that which a high and sensitive mind derives from the perusal of innumerable passages in every book of this inimitable work of poetical fiction ?-The very story never relaxes: it is thick-wove with incident, as well as sentiment, and argumentative grandeur: and how it closes, when the archangel waves the "flaming-brand" over the eastern gate of Paradise; and, on looking back, Adam and Eve saw the "dreadful faces" and "fiery arms" that "throng'd" round it!—In what other poem is any passage so heart-rending and so terrible as this?

PARADISE REGAINED.

THE 'Paradise Regained' bears the same character, compared with the 'Paradise Lost,' as the New Testament bears, compared with the Old: it is more subdued, more didactic, more simple and unornamented, more practical, and less imaginative. The holy poet seems to have been awed by his subject, and to have given less of his own, either of thought, matter, or language: he appears rather the oracle or channel through which the voice of the Divinity speaks. There is less of human learning, but more than human wisdom ;-less of that visionariness of dimly-embodied half-spiritual forms; and none of that gorgeous display of sublime creation, which the pictures everywhere abounding in Paradise Lost' exhibit. All in the 'Paradise Regained' wears a sober, serene majesty, like the mellow light of the moon in a calm autumnal evening.

It is true that the essence of poetry is not merely imagination or invention, but invention of a particular quality; and this belongs to the 'Paradise Lost' more than to the Paradise Regained' as, for instance, to Satan's escape from hell, and his first sight of the newly-created globe of earth, and Adam and Eve placed in the enjoyment of it, than to the description of Christ's entry into the wilderness, and Satan in disguise first accosting him; but though the latter description is less grandly imaginative, it is still rich with invention, and invention which is truly poetical: still it is a representation of actual existences, though not a copy of them.

Milton is here pre-eminent in designing character and sentiment: his dialogue is supported with miraculous power and force; and its strength and sublimity shine out the more from the extreme plainness of the language: the task was perilous to find adequate arguments for the contest between the Divine Humanity and a devil. The reader who is not deeplymoved, and deeply instructed by it, must be one of brutish and hopeless stupidity. I have said before, that I deemed it an unquestionable duty of every one who understands the English language to study Milton next to the Holy Writings: this remark more especially applies to the description of the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. The Paradise Lost' is moral and didactic, but less so than the Paradise Regained.'

Satan tempts Christ first by the offer of sensual pleasures; then of riches; then of power; then of glory; and, last, of intellectual pleasures: but Warburton objects to these temptations conquered, as the means of Paradise Regained ;' and asserts, that the poet ought to have dwelt on Christ's death and resurrection as the price paid for this redemption. He says:

"Whether Milton supposed the redemption of mankind, as he here represents it, was procured by Christ's triumph over the devil in the wilderness; or whether he thought that the scene of the desert, opposed to that of Paradise; and the action of a temptation withstood, to a temptation fallen under, made Paradise Regained'

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a more regular sequel to Paradise Lost;' or, if neither this nor that, whether it was his being tired out with the labour of composing Paradise Lost,' which made him averse to another work of length (and then he would never be at a loss for fanciful reasons to determine him in the choice of his plan), is very uncertain. All that we can be sure of is, that the plan is a very unhappy one, and defective even in that narrow view of a sequel; for it affords the poet no opportunity of driving the devil back again to hell from his new conquests in the air. In the mean time, nothing was easier than to have invented a good one, which should end with the resurrection; and to comprise these four books, somewhat contracted, in an episode; for which only the subject of them is fit.”

Warburton was a man of great subtlety, force, and originality; but totally deficient in poetical taste. To have contracted the matter of these four books, would indeed have been a loss and a destruction. If the poem had been extended to the length of the Paradise Lost,' it might indeed have contained that of which Warburton charges the omission as a great defect: but as the poem now stands, it is a perfect whole in itself; and it is not improbable, that the poet found age and sickness too fast pressing upon him to make it longer.

It seems to me, that, in my preliminary remarks upon one of Milton's chief poems, I cannot do better than impress on the reader the peculiarity of the bard's genius, and endeavour to imbue him with a Miltonic taste; which is so distinct from that of all other poetry. That this is no fancy of my own, I can establish on the authority of Milton himself, and of the comments of two distinguished

annotators.

I refer to the passage beginning v. 285 of b. iv. of 'Paradise Regained,' which contains Christ's answer to Satan's panegyric of human learning, beginning v. 236, describing Athens as the seat of all intellectual glory. Our Saviour answers, v. 309 :— Alas! what can they teach, and not mislead, Ignorant of themselves, of God much more,

And how the world began, and how man fell
Degraded by himself, on grace depending? &c. &c.

Remove their swelling epithets, thick laid
As varnish on an harlot's cheek; the rest,
Thin sown with aught of profit or delight,
Will far be found unworthy to compare
With Sion's songs, to all true tastes excelling,
Where God is praised aright, and godlike men,
The holiest of holies, and his saints;

Such are from God inspired, not such from thee;
Unless where moral virtue is express'd
By light of nature, not in all quite lost.
Their orators thou then extoll'st, as those
The top of eloquence; statists indeed,

And lovers of their country, as may seem;
But herein to our prophets far beneath,
As men divinely taught, and better teaching

The solid rules of civil government,

In their majestick unaffected style,
Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome.

In them is plainest taught and easiest learnt,
What makes a nation happy, keeps it so;
What ruins kingdoms, and lays cities flat:
These only with our law best form a king.

Thyer observes here, that "this answer of our Saviour is as much to be admired for solid reasoning, and the many sublime truths contained in it, as the preceding speech of Satan is for that fine vein of poetry which runs through it: and one may observe in general, that Milton has quite, throughout this work, thrown the ornaments of poetry on the side of error: whether it was that he thought great truths best expressed in a grave, unaffected style; or intended to suggest this fine moral to the reader;—that simple naked truth will always be an overmatch for falsehood, though recommended by the gayest rhetoric, and adorned with the most bewitching colours. As to the inferiority of Grecian literature to the songs of Sion, Newton observes, that Milton was of this opinion, not only in the decline of life, but likewise in his earlier days, as appears from the Preface to his second book of The Reason of Church Government :-"Or if occasion shall lead to imitate those magnific Odes and Hymns wherein Pindarus and Callimachus are in most things worthy, some others in their frame judicious, in their matter most an end faulty. But those frequent songs throughout the law and prophets beyond all these, not in their divine argument alone, but in the very critical art of composition, may be easily made appear over all the kinds of lyric poesy to be incomparable."

On this note Warton makes the following comment :-"But Milton now appears to have imbibed so strong a tincture of fanaticism, as to decry all human composi tions and profane subjects. In the context he speaks with absolute contempt, even in a critical view; and a general disapprobation of the Greek odes and hymns. (Read ver. 343 to ver. 348.) Undoubtedly these were Milton's own sentiments, though delivered in an assumed character. Even in his own person he had long before given the substance of the context, as cited by Dr. Newton: it must, however, be observed that Christ is here answering Satan's speech, and counteracting his exquisite panegyric on the philosophers, poets, and orators of Athens: yet at the same time, I can conceive that Satan's speech, which here he means to confute, and which no man was more able to write than himself, came from the heart*. The writers of dialogue in feigned characters have great advantage.”

The chief purpose for which I have introduced this criticism here is this,—that the reader may not look for what are thought the common ornaments or spells of poetry: he must look for stern truths; for sublime sentiments; for naked grandeur of imagery; for an absence of all the rhetorical flourishes of literary composition; for the dictates of a lofty and divine virtue; for a bold and gigantic dispersion of the veil from the delusions of human vanity; for the blaze of an Evil Spirit eclipsed by the splendour of a Good and Divine Spirit, illumined by the lamp of Heaven.

But though a great part of the poem is intellectual and argumentative, another large portion is full of grand or beautiful imagery: the description of the wilderness at the opening abounds with sublime scenery: the picture of the storm at the close of the last book, with the bright morning which succeeded, may vie with any of the noblest passages in the Paradise Lost;' perhaps in expression, while it loses nothing of grandeur, it is more polished than any other to be found.

Milton intended this poem as the brief or didactic epic, of which he considered the book of Job to be a model, such as he notices in the second book of his 'Reason of Church Government.' "Milton," says Hayley, "had already executed one extensive divine poem, peculiarly distinguished by richness and sublimity of description in framing a second he naturally wished to vary its effect; to make it

*Surely there is here something of inconsistency in Warton.