PART I.

THE character of MILTON has been scrutinized with all the minuteness of investigation, which opposite passions could suggest. The virulent antagonist and the enraptured idolater have pursued his steps with equal perti­nacity: nor have we wanted men of learning and virtue, who, devoid of prejudice and enthusiasm, both in politics and in poetry, have endeavoured to weigh his merits ex­actly in the balance of truth and reason.

What new light then can be thrown upon a life, whose incidents have been so eagerly collected, and so frequently retailed? What novelty of remark can be expected in a review of poems, whose beauties and blemishes have been elaborately examined in critical dissertations, that almost rival in excellence the poetry they discuss? Assuredly but little; yet there remains, perhaps, one method of giving a [Page 2] degree of interest and illustration to the life of Milton, which it has not hitherto received; a method which his accomplished friend of Italy, the Marquis of Villa, in some measure adopted in his interesting life of Tasso; and which two engaging biographers of later date, the Abbé de Sade and Mr. Mason, have carried to greater perfection in their respective memoirs of Petrarch and of Gray. By weaving into their narrative selections of verse and prose from the various writings of those they wished to commemorate, each of these affectionate memorialists may be said to have taught the poet he loved "to become his own biographer;" an experiment that may, perhaps, be tried on Milton with the happiest effect! as in his works, and particularly in those that are at present the lead known, he has spoken frequently of himself.—Not from vanity, a failing too cold and low for his ardent and elevated mind; but, in advanced life, from motives of justice and honour, to defend himself against the poisoned arrows of slander; and, in his younger days, from that tenderness and simplicity of heart, which lead a youth­ful poet to make his own affections and amusements the chief subjects of his song.

The great aim of the subsequent account is to render full and perfect justice to the general character of Milton. His manners and cast of mind, in various periods of life, may appear in a new and agreeable light, from the following col­lection and arrangement of the many little sketches, which his own hand has occasionally given us, of his passions and pursuits. Several of these, indeed, have been fondly assem­bled by Toland or Richardson; men, who, different as they [Page 3] were in their general sentiments and principles, yet sympathized completely in their zeal for the renown of Milton; delight­ing to dwell on his character with ‘that shadow of friend­ship, that complacency and ardour of attachment, which, as Pope has observed in speaking of Homer, we naturally feel for the great geniuses of former time.’—But those who have endeavoured to illustrate the personal history of the great English Author, by exhibiting passages from some of his neglected works, have almost confined themselves to selections from his prose.

There is an ampler field for the study of his early temper and turn of mind in his Latin and Italian Poetry: here the heart and spirit of Milton are displayed with all the frank­ness of youth. I select what has a peculiar tendency to shew, in the clearest light, his native disposition, because his charac­ter as a man appears to have been greatly mistaken. I am under no fear that the frequency or length of such citations may be exposed to censure, having the pleasure and advantage of pre­senting them to the English reader in the elegant and spirited version of a poet and a friend—with pride and delight I add the name of Cowper. This gentleman, who is prepared to oblige the world with a complete translation of Milton's Latin and Italian poetry, has kindly favoured me with the liberty of transcribing, from his admirable work, whatever I wish to insert in this narrative. Since I am indebted to Milton for a friendship, which I regard as honourable in the highest degree, may I be indulged in the hope of leaving a lasting memorial of it in these pages.

[Page 4]A book, devoted to the honour of Milton, may admit, I hope, without impropriety, the praises due to a living author, who is become his poetical interpreter; an office which the spirit of the divine bard may be gratified in his having assumed; for, assuredly, my friend bears no common resemblance to his most illustrious predecessor, not only in the energy and hallowed use of poetical talents, but in that beneficent fervour and purity of heart, which entitle the great poet to as large a portion of affectionate esteem, as he has long possessed of admiration.

JOHN MILTON was born in London, on the 9th of December, 1608, at the house of his father, in Bread-street, and baptized on the 20th of the same month. His christian name descended to him from his grandfather. The family, once opulent proprietors of Milton, in Oxfordshire, lost that estate in the civil wars of York and Lancaster, and was in­debted, perhaps, to adversity for much higher distinction than opulence can bestow. John, the grandfather of the poet, became deputy ranger in the forest of Shotover, not far from Oxford; and intending to educate his son as a gen­tleman, he placed him at Christ-Church, in that university; but being himself a rigid Papist, he disinherited the young and devout scholar, for an attachment to the doctrines of the Reformation, and reduced him to the necessity of quitting the path of literature for a less honourable but more lucra­tive profession.

The discarded student applied himself to the employment of a scrivener, which has varied with the variations of life and [Page 5] manners. A scrivener, in remoter ages, is supposed to have been a mere transcriber; but at the period we speak of, his occupation united the two profitable branches of drawing contracts and of lending money. The emoluments of this profession enabled the father of Milton to bestow most abund­antly on his son those advantages of education, which had been cruelly withdrawn from himself. The poet was happy in both his parents; and to the merits of both he has borne affectionate and honourable testimony. The maiden name of his mother has been disputed; but it seems reasonable to credit the account of Philips, her grandson, the earliest bio­grapher of Milton, who had the advantage of living with him as a relation and a disciple.

Her name, according to this author, who speaks highly of her virtue, was Caston, and her family derived from Wales. Milton, in mentioning his own origin, with a decent pride, in reply to one of his revilers, asserts, that his mother was a woman of exemplary character, and peculiarly distinguished by her extensive charity^*. The parental kindness and the talents of his father he has celebrated in a Latin poem, which cannot be too warmly admired, as a monument of filial ten­derness, and poetical enthusiasm. It is probable, that the severe manner in which that indulgent father had been driven from the pursuits of learning induced him to exert uncommon liberality and ardour in the education of his son. Though immersed himself in a lucrative occupation, he seems to have retained great elegance of mind, and to have [Page 6] amused himself with literature and music; to the latter he applied so successfully, that, according to Dr. Burney, the accomplished historian of that captivating art, "he became a voluminous composer, equal in science, if not in genius, to the best musicians of his age." Nor did his talents pass without celebrity or reward. Philips relates, that for one of his devotional compositions in forty parts, he was honoured with a gold chain and medal by a Polish prince, to whom he presented it. This mark of distinction was frequently conferred on men, who rose to great excellence in different arts and sciences: perhaps the ambition of young Milton was first awakened by these gifts of honour bestowed upon his father^*.

A parent, who could enliven the drudgery of a dull pro­fession by a variety of elegant pursuits, must have been happy to discern, and eager to cherish, the first dawning of genius in his child. In this point of view we may contemplate with peculiar delight the infantine portrait of Milton, by that elegant and faithful artist, Cornelius Jansen. Aubrey, the antiquarian, observing in his manuscript memoirs of our [Page 7] author, that he was ten years old when this picture was drawn, affirms that "he was then a poet." This expression may lead us to imagine, that the portrait was executed to encourage the infant author; and if so, it might operate as a powerful incentive to his future exertion. The permanent bias of an active spirit often originates in the petty incidents of childhood; and as no human mind ever glowed with a more intense, or with a purer flame of literary ambition, than the mind of Milton, it may not be unpleasing to conjecture how it first caught the sparks, that gradually mounted to a blaze of unrivalled vehemence and splendor.

His education, as Dr. Newton has well observed, united the opposite advantages of private and public instruction. Of his early passion for letters he has left the following record, in his second defence^*: "My father destined me from my infancy to the study of polite literature, which I embraced with such avidity, that from the age of twelve, I hardly ever retired from my books before midnight. This proved the first source of injury to my eyes, whose natural weakness was attended with frequent pains of the head; but as all these disadvantages could not repress my ardour for learn­ing, my father took care to have me instructed by various preceptors both at home and at school." His domestic tutor was Thomas Young, of Essex, who, being obliged to quit his country on account of religious opinions, became minister [Page 8] to the English merchants at Hamburgh. It was probably from this learned and conscientious man, that Milton caught not only his passion for literature, but that steadiness and unconquerable integrity of character, by which he was dis­tinguished through all the vicissitudes of a tempestuous life. His reverential gratitude and affection towards this preceptor are recorded in two Latin epistles^*, and a Latin elegy addressed [Page 9] to him: they suggest a most favourable idea of the poet's native disposition, and furnish an effectual antidote to the poison of that most injurious assertion, that "he hated all whom he was required to obey."—Could untractable pride be the characteristic of a mind, which has expressed its re­gard for a disciplinarian sufficiently rigid, with a tenderness so conspicuous in the following verses of the fourth Elegy?

And again, in expressing his regret upon the length of their separation:

As the tenderness of the young poet is admirably displayed in the beginning of this Elegy, his more acknowledged cha­racteristic, religious fortitude, is not less admirable in the close of it.

The reader, inclined to symphatise in the joys of Mil­ton, will be gratified in being informed, that his preceptor, whose exile and poverty he pathetically lamented, and whose prosperous return he predicted, was in a few years restored [Page 12] to his country, and became Master of Jesus College, in Cambridge.

As the year in which he quitted England (1623) cor­responds with the fifteenth year of his pupil's age, it is pro­bable that Milton was placed, at that time, under the care of Mr. Gill and his son; the former, chief master of St. Paul's school, the latter, his assistant, and afterwards his successor. It is remarkable, that Milton, who has been so uncandidly represented as an uncontroulable spirit, and a spurner of all just authority, seems to have contracted a ten­der attachment to more than one disciplinarian concerned in his education. He is said to have been the favourite scholar of the younger Gill; and he has left traces of their friendship in three Latin epistles, that express the highest esteem for the literary character and poetical talents of his instructor.

On the 12th of February, 1624, he was entered, not as as a sizar, which some of his biographers have erroneously asserted, but as a pensioner of Christ's College, in Cam­bridge. "At this time," says Doctor Johnson, ‘he was eminently skilled in the Latin tongue, and he himself, by annexing the dates to his first compositions, a boast of which the learned Politian had given him an example, seems to commend the carliness of his own proficiency to the notice of posterity; but the products of his vernal fertility have been surpassed by many, and particularly by his contemporary, Cowley. Of the powers of the mind it is difficult to form an estimate; many have excelled Milton in their first essays, who never rose to works like Paradise Lost.’

[Page 13]This is the first of many remarks, replete with detraction, in which an illustrious author has indulged his spleen against Milton, in a life of the poet, where an ill-subdued propen­sity to censure is ever combating with a necessity to com­mend. The partisans of the powerful critic, from a natu­ral partiality to their departed master, affect to consider his malignity as existing only in the prejudices of those who endeavour to counteract his injustice. A biographer of Milton ought therefore to regard it as his indispensible duty to show how far this malignity is diffused through a long series of observations, which affect the reputation both of the poet and the man; a duty that must be painful in proportion to the sincerity of our esteem for literary genius; since, different as they were in their principles, their man­ners, and their writings, both the poet and his critical biographer are assuredly entitled to the praise of exalted ge­nius. Perhaps in the republic of letters there never existed two writers more deservedly distinguished, not only for the energy of their mental faculties, but for a generous and devout desire to benefit mankind by their exertion.

Yet it must be lamented, and by the lovers of Milton in particular, that a moralist, who has given us, in the Rambler, such sublime lessons for the discipline of the heart and mind, should be unable to preserve his own from that acrimonious spirit of detraction, which led him to depreciate, to the utmost of his power, the rare abilities, and perhaps the still rarer integrity, of Milton. It may be said, that the truly eloquent and splendid encomium, which he has bestowed on the great work of the poet, ought to exempt [Page 14] him from such a charge. The singular beauties and effect of this eulogy shall be mentioned in the proper place, and with all the applause they merit; but here it is just to re­collect, that the praise of the encomiast is nearly confined to the sentence he passes as a critic; his more diffusive detraction may be traced in almost every page of the biographer: not to encounter it on its first appearance, and wherever it is visible and important, would be to fail in that justice and regard towards the character of Milton, which he, perhaps, of all men, has most eminently deserved.

In the preceding citation it is evidently the purpose of Dr. Johnson to degrade Milton below Cowley, and many other poets, distinguished by juvenile compositions; but Mr. Warton has, with great taste and judgment, exposed the error of Dr. Johnson, in preferring the Latin poetry of Cowley to that of Milton. An eminent foreign critic has bestowed that high praise on the juvenile productions of our author, which his prejudiced countryman is inclined to deny. Morhoff has affirmed, with equal truth and libera­lity, that the verses, which Milton produced in his childhood, discover both the fire and judgment of maturer life: a commendation that no impartial reader will be inclined to extenuate, who peruses the spirited epistle to his exiled pre­ceptor, composed in his eighteenth year. Some of his English verses bear an earlier date. The first of his juvenile productions, in the language which he was destined to enno­ble, is a paraphrase of the hundred and fourteenth psalm; it was executed at the age of fifteen, and discovers a power that Dryden, and other more presumptuous critics, have [Page 15] unjustly denied to Milton, the power of moving with faci­lity in the fetters of rhyme: this power is still more conspi­cuous in the poem he wrote at the age of seventeen, on the death of his sister's child; a composition peculiarly enti­tled to the notice of those, who love to contemplate the early dawn of poetical genius. In this performance, puerile as it is in every sense of the word, the intelligent reader may yet discern, as in the bud, all the striking characteristics of Milton; his affectionate sensibility, his superior imagina­tion, and all that native tendency to devotional enthusiasm,

Admirably trained as the youth of the poet was to acquire academical honour by the union of industry and talents, he seems to have experienced at Cambridge a chequered for­tune, very similar to his destiny in the world. It appears from some remarkable passages in the Latin exercises, which he recited in his College, that he was at first an object of partial severity, and afterwards of general admiration, He had differed in opinion concerning a plan of academical studies with some persons of authority in his college, and thus ex­cited their displeasure. He speaks of them as highly in­censed against him; but expresses, with the most liberal sensibility, his surprise, delight, and gratitude, in finding that his enemies forgot their animosity to honour him with unex­pected applause.

An idle story has been circulated concerning his treatment in College. "I am ashamed," says Dr. Johnson, "to relate [Page 16] what I fear is true, that Milton was the last student in either University that suffered the public indignity of cor­poral punishment." In confirmation of this incident, which appears improbable, though supported by Mr. Warton, the biographical critic alledges the following passage from the first Elegy:

Dr. Johnson considers these expressions as an absolute proof, that Milton was obliged to undergo this indignity; but they may suggest a very different idea. From all the light we can obtain concerning this anecdote, it seems most probable, that Milton was threatened, indeed, with what he considered as a punishment, not only dishonourable but un­merited; that his manly spirit disdained to submit to it; and that he was therefore obliged to acquiesce in a short exile from Cambridge.

In speaking of his academical life, it is necessary to obvi­ate another remark of a similar tendency.

"There is reason," says Johnson, "to suspect that he was regarded in his college with no great fondness." To coun­teract [Page 17] this invidious insinuation we are furnished with a reply, made by Milton himself, to this very calumny, ori­ginally fabricated by one of his contemporaries; a calumny, which he had so fully refuted, that it ought to have revived no more! He begins with thanking his reviler for the asper­sion: "It has given me," he says, ‘an apt occasion to ac­knowledge publicly, with all grateful mind, that more than ordinary favour and respect, which I found, above any of my equals, at the hand of those courteous and learned men, the Fellows of that College, wherein I spent some years; who, at my parting, after I had taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways how much better it would content them that I would stay, as by many let­ters, full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and long after, I was assured of their singular good affection towards me.—Prose Works, vol. 1, p. 15.’

The Latin poems of Milton are yet entitled to more of our attention; because they exhibit lively proofs, that he possessed both tenderness and enthusiasm, those primary con­stituents of a poet, at an early period of life, and in the highest degree: they have additional value, from making us acquainted with several interesting particulars of his youth, and many of his opinions, which must have had considerable influence on his moral character.

His sixth Elegy, addressed to his bosom friend, Charles Diodati, seems to be founded on the idea, which he may be said to have verified in his own conduct, that strict habits of temperance and virtue are highly conducive to the perfec­tion of great poetical powers. To poets of a lighter class [Page 18] he recommends, with graceful pleasantry, much convivial en­joyment; but for those who aspire to Epic renown, he prescribes even the simple regimen of Pythagoras.

In his Elegy on the Spring, our poet expresses the fervent emotions of his fancy in terms, that may be almost regarded as a prophetic description of his sublimest work:

With these verses it may be pleasing to compare a similar passage in his English vacation exercise, where, addressing his native language, as applied to an inconsiderable purpose, he adds,

"It is worth the curious reader's attention to observe how much the Paradise Lost corresponds with this prophetic wish," says Mr. Thyer, one of the most intelligent and libe­ral of English commentators.

The young poet, who thus expressed his ambition, was then in his nineteenth year. At the age of twenty-one (the period of his life when that pleasing portrait of him was ex­ecuted, which the Speaker Onslow obtained from the exe­cutors of his widow) he composed his Ode on the Nativity; a poem that surpasses in fancy and devotional fire a compo­sition on the same subject by that celebrated and devout poet of Spain, Lopez de Vega.

[Page 20]The most trifling performances of Milton are so singular, that we may regret even the loss of the verses alluded to by Aubrey, as the offspring of his childhood. Perhaps no ju­venile author ever displayed, with such early force,

His mind, even in his boyish days, seems to have glowed, like the fancy and furnace of an alchymist, with incessant hope and preparation for astonishing productions.

Such austerity and moroseness have been falsely attributed to Milton, that a reader, acquainted with him only as he appears in the page of Johnson, must suppose him little formed for love; but his poetry in general, and especially the compositions we are now speaking of, may convince us, that he felt, with the most exquisite sensibility, the magic of beauty, and all the force of female attraction. His seventh Elegy exhibits a lively picture of his first passion; he repre­sents himself as captivated by an unknown fair, who, though he saw her but for a moment, made a deep impression on his heart.

The juvenile poet then addresses himself to love, with a request that beautifully expresses all the inquietude, and all the irresolution, of hopeless attachment.

After having contemplated the youthful fancy of Milton under the influence of a sudden and vehement affection, let us survey him in a different point of view, and admire the purity and vigour of mind, which he exerted at the age of twenty-three, in meditation on his past and his future days.

To a friend, who had remonstrated with him on his delay to enter upon active life, he ascribes that delay to an intense desire of rendering himself more fit for it. ‘Yet (he says) that you may see that I am something suspicious of myselfe, and doe take notice of a certain belatednesse in me, I am [Page 22] the bolder to send you some of my night-ward thoughts, some while since, because they come in not altogether unfitly, made up in a Petrarchian stanza, which I told you of:’

This sonnet may be regarded, perhaps, as a refutation of that injurious criticism, which has asserted, "the best sonnets of Milton are entitled only to this negative commendation, that they are not bad;" but it has a superior value, which induced me to introduce it here, as it seems to reveal the ruling principle, which gave bias and energy to the mind and conduct of Milton; I mean the habit, which he so early adopted, of considering himself ‘As ever in his great task master's eye.’

[Page 23]It was, perhaps, the force and permanency with which this persuasion was impressed on his heart, that enabled him to ascend the sublimest heights, both of genius and of virtue.

When Milton began his course of academical study, he had views of soon entering the church, to "whose service," he says, ‘by the intentions of my parents and friends, I was destined of a child, and in mine own resolutions.’ It was a religious scruple that prevented him from taking orders; and though his mode of thinking may be deemed erroneous, there is a refined and hallowed probity in his conduct on this occasion, that is entitled to the highest esteem; particularly when we consider, that although he declined the office of a minister, he devoted himself, with intense application, to what he considered as the interest of true religion. The sincerity and fervour with which he speaks on this topic must be applauded by every candid person, however differing from him on points that relate to our religious establish­ment.

‘For me (says this zealous and disinterested advocate for simple christianity) I have determined to lay up, as the best treasure and solace of a good old age, if God vouchsafe it me, the honest liberty of free speech from my youth, where I shall think it available in so dear a concernment as the church's good.’ In the polemical writings of Milton there is a merit to which few polemics can pretend; they were the pure dictates of conscience, and produced by the sacrifice of his favourite pursuits: this he has stated in the following very forcible and interesting language:

Such is the delineation that our author has given us of his own mind and motives in his treatise on Church Go­vernment, which the mention of his early design to take or­ders has led me to anticipate.

Having passed seven years in Cambridge, and taken his two degrees, that of batchelor, in 1628, and that of master, in 1632, he was admitted to the same degree at Oxford, in 1635. On quitting an academical life, he was, according to his own testimony, regretted by the fellows of his col­lege; but he regarded the house of his father as a retreat favourable to his literary pursuits, and, at the age of twenty-four, he gladly shared the [...]ural retirement, in which his parents ha [...] recently settled, [...] Horton, in Buckinghamshire: here he devoted himself, for five years, to study, with that ardour and perseverance, to which, as he says himself, in a letter to his friend, Charles Diodati, his nature forcibly in­clined him. The letter I [...]m speaking of was written in the last year of his residence under the roof of his father, [Page 26] and exhibits a lively picture of his progress in learning, his passion for virtue, and his hope of renown.

"To give you an account of my studies," he says, "I have brought down the affairs of the Greeks, in a continued course of reading, to the period in which they ceased to be Greeks. I have long been engaged in the obscurer parts of Italian history, under the Lombards, the Franks, and the Germans, to the time in which liberty was granted them by the em­peror Rodolphus; from this point I think it best to pursue, in separate histories, the exploits of each particular city^*."

He shews himself, in this letter, most passionately attached to the Platonic philosophy: "As to other points, what God may have determined for me, I know not; but this I know, that if he ever instilled an intense love of moral beauty into the breast ot any man, he has instilled it into mine: Ceres, in the fable, pursued not her daughter with a greater keenness of enquiry, than I, day and night, the idea of perfection. Hence, wherever I find a man despising the false estimates of the vulgar, and daring to aspire, in sentiment, language, and conduct, to what the highest wisdom, through every age, has taught us as most excellent, to him I unite myself by a sort of necessary attachment; and if I am so influenced by nature or destiny, that by no exertion or labours of my own I may exalt myself to this summit of worth and honour, yet no powers of heaven or earth will hinder me from look­ing with reverence and affection upon those, who have tho­roughly [Page 27] attained this glory, or appear engaged in the suc­cessful pursuit of it.

"You enquire, with a kind of solicitude, even into my thoughts.—Hear then, Diodati, but let me whisper in your ear, that I may not blush at my reply—I think (so help me Heaven) of immortality. You enquire also, what I am about? I nurse my wings, and meditate a flight; but my Pegasus rises as yet on very tender pinions. Let us be humbly wise!^*"

This very interesting epistle, in which Milton pours forth his heart to the favourite friend of his youth, may con­vince every candid reader, that he possessed, in no common degree, two qualities very rarely united, ambitious ardour of mind and unaffected modesty. The poet, who speaks with such graceful humility of his literary atchievements, had at this time written Comus, a composition that abund­antly displays the variety and compass of his poetical powers. After he had delineated, with equal excellence, the frolics [Page 28] of gaiety and the triumphs of virtue, passing with exquisite transition from the most sportive to the sublimest tones of poetry, he might have spoken more confidently of his own productions without a particle of arrogance.

We know not exactly what poems he composed during his residence at Horton. The Arcades seems to have been one of his early compositions, and it was intended as a compliment to his fair neighbour, the accomplished Countess Dowager of Derby; she was the sixth daughter of Sir John Spencer, and allied to Spencer the poet, who, with his usual modesty and tenderness, has celebrated her under the title of Amarillis. At the house of this lady, near Uxbridge, Milton is said to have been a frequent visitor. The Earl of Bridgewater, before whom, and by whose children, Comus was repre­sented, had married a daughter of Ferdinando Earl of Derby, and thus, as Mr. Warton observes, it was for the same family that Milton wrote both the Arcades and Comus. It is probable that the pleasure, which the Arcades afforded to the young relations of the Countess, gave rise to Comus, as Lawes, the musical friend of Milton, in dedi­cating the mask to the young Lord Brackley, her grandson, says, "this poem, which received its first occasion of birth from yourself and others of your noble family, and much honour from your own person in the performance."

These expressions of Lawes allude, perhaps, to the real in­cident, which is said to have supplied the subject of Comus, and may seem to confirm an anecdote related by Mr. Warton, from a manuscript of Oldys; that the young and noble per­formers in this celebrated drama were really involved in [Page 29] adventures very similar to their theatrical situation; that in visiting their relations, in Herefordshire, they were benighted in a forest, and the lady Alice Egerton actually lost.

Whatever might be the origin of the mask, the modesty of the youthful poet appears very conspicuous in the follow­ing words of Lawes's dedication: ‘Although not openly acknowledged by the author, yet it is a legitimate off­spring, so lovely and so much desired, that the often copy­ing of it hath tired my pen, to give my several friends sa­tisfaction, and brought me to a necessity of producing it to the public view.’

Milton discovered a similar diffidence respecting his Lyci­das, which was written while he resided with his father, in November, 1637. This exquisite poem, which, as Mr. Warton justly observes, ‘must have been either solicited as a favour by those whom the poet had lest in his college, or was a voluntary contribution of friendship sent to them from the country,’ appeared first in the academical col­lection of verses on the death of Mr. Edward King, and was subscribed only with the initials of its author.

An animated and benevolent veteran of criticism, Doctor Warton, has considered a relish for the Lycidas as a test of true taste in poetry; and it certainly is a test, which no lover of Milton will be inclined to dispute; though it must ex­clude from the list of accomplished critics that intemperate censor of the great poet, who has endeavoured to destroy the reputation of his celebrated monody with the most insult­ing expressions of sarcastic contempt; expressions that no reader of a spirit truly poetical can peruse without mingled [Page 30] emotions of indignation and of pity! But the charms of Lycidas are of a texture too firm to be annihilated by the breath of derision; and though Doctor Johnson has declared the poem to be utterly destitute both of nature and of art, it will assuredly continue to be admired as long as tender­ness, imagination, and harmony, are regarded as genuine sources of poetical delight.

The effect of this favourite composition is exactly such as the poet intended to produce; it first engages the heart with the simplicity of just and natural sorrow, and then pro­ceeds to elevate the mind with magnificent images, ennobled by affectionate and devotional enthusiasm.

The beauties of this pathetic and sublime monody are sufficiently obvious; but the reader, who compares it with a poem on the same subject by Cleveland, once the popular rival of Milton, may derive pleasure from perceiving how infinitely our favourite poet has excelled, on this occasion, an eminent antagonist.

Though we find no circumstances, that may ascertain the date of the Allegro and Pensoroso, it seems probable, that those two enchanting pictures of rural life, and of the di­versified delights arising from a contemplative mind, were composed at Horton. It was, perhaps, in the same situation, so favourable to poetical exertions, that Milton wrote the incomparable Latin poem addressed to his father. There are, indeed, some expressions in this performance, which may favour an opinion that it ought to bear an earlier date; but it has such strength and manliness of sentiment, as incline me to suppose it written at this period; an idea that seems [Page 31] almost confirmed by the lines, that speak of his application to French and Italian, after the completion of his classical studies.

Whatever date may be assigned to it, the composition de­serves our particular regard, since, of all his poems, it does the highest honour to his heart.

With what energy and tenderness is his filial gratitude expressed in the following graceful exordium:

How elegant is the praise he bestows on the musical ta­lents of his father, and how pleasing the exulting and affec­tionate spirit with which he speaks of their social and kindred studies!

The poet seems to have had a prophetic view of the sin­gular calumnies, that awaited his reputation, and to have [Page 34] anticipated his triumph, over all his adversaries, in the fol­lowing magnanimous exclamation:

After this high ton'd burst of confidence and indigna­tion, how sweetly the poet sinks again into the tender notes of gratitude, in the close of this truly filial composition!

"He began now," says Johnson, ‘to grow weary of the country, and had some purpose of taking chambers in the inns of court.’

This weariness appears to have existed only in the fancy of his biographer. During the five years that Milton resided with his parents, in Buckinghamshire, he had occasional lodgings in London, which he visited, as he informs us him­self, for the purpose of buying books, and improving him­self in mathematics and in music, at that time his favourite amusements. The letter, which intimates his intention of taking chambers in the inns of court, was not written [Page 36] from the country, as his biographer seems to have supposed; it is dated from London, and only expresses, that his quar­ters there appeared to him awkward and inconvenient^*.

On the death of his mother, who died in April, 1637, and is buried in the chancel of Horton church, he obtained his father's permission to gratify his eager desire of visiting the continent, a permission the more readily granted, per­haps, as one of his motives for visiting Italy was to form a collection of Italian music.

Having received some directions for his travels from the celebrated Sir Henry Wotton, he went, with a single ser­vant, to Paris, in 1638; he was there honoured by the no­tice of Lord Scudamore, the English ambassador, who, at his earnest desire, gave him an introduction to Grotius, then residing at Paris as the minister of Sweden.

Curiosity is naturally excited by the idea of a conference between two persons so eminent and accomplished. It has been conjectured, that Milton might conceive his first de­sign of writing a tragedy on the banishment of Adam from this interview with Grotius; but if the Adamus Exsul of the Swedish ambassador were a subject of their discourse, it is probable its author must have spoken of it but slightly, as a juvenile composition, since he does so in a letter to his friend Vossius, in 1616, concerning a new edition of his [Page 37] poetry, from which he particularly excluded this sacred drama, as too puerile, in his own judgment, to be re-pub­lished^*.

The letters of Grotius, voluminous and circumstantial as they are, afford no traces of this interesting visit; but they lead me to imagine, that the point, which the learned ambassador most warmly recommended to Milton, on his departure for Italy, was, to pay the kindest attention in his power to the sufferings of Galileo, then persecuted as a pri­soner by the inquisition in Florence.

In a letter to Vossius, dated in the very month when Milton was probably introduced to Grotius, that liberal friend to science and humanity speaks thus of Galileo: "This old man, to whom the universe is so deeply indebted, worn out with maladies, and still more with anguish of mind, give us little reason to hope, that his life can be long; common prudence, therefore, suggests to us to make the utmost of the time, while we can yet avail ourselves of such an instructor^†." Milton was, of all travellers, the most likely to seize a hint of this kind with avidity, and expressions in Paradise Lost have led an Italian biographer of the poet to suppose, that while he resided at Florence he caught from Galileo, or his disciples, some ideas approaching towards the Newtonian philosophy. He has informed us himself, that he really saw the illustrious scientific prisoner of the inqui­sition, [Page 38] and it seems not unreasonable to conclude, that he was in some degree indebted to his conference with Grotius for that mournful gratification.

From Paris our author proceeded to Italy, embarking at Nice for Genoa. After a cursory view of Leghorn and Pisa, he settled for two months at Florence; a city, which he particularly regarded for the elegance of its language, and the men of genius it had produced; here, as he in­forms us, he became familiar with many persons distin­guished by their rank and learning; and here, probably, he began to form those great, but unsettled, projects of future composition, which were to prove the sources of his glory, and of which he thus speaks himself:

It is delightful to contemplate such a character as Milton, thus cherishing, in his own mind, the seeds of future great­ness, and animating his youthful spirit with visions of re­nown, that time has realized and extended beyond his most sanguine wishes.

He appears, on every occasion, a sincere and fervent lover of his country, and expresses, in one of his Latin Poems, the [Page 40] same patriotic idea, that he should be satisfied with glory confined to these Islands.

In tracing the literary ambition of Milton from the first conception of his great purposes to their accomplishment, we seem to participate in the triumph of his genius, which, though it aspired only to the praise of these British islands, is already grown an object of universal admiration, and may find hereafter, in the western world, the amplest theatre of his glory.

Dr. Johnson takes occasion, from the passage in which Milton speaks of the literary projects he conceived in Italy, [Page 41] to remark, that ‘he had a lofty and steady confidence in himself, perhaps not without some contempt of others.’ The latter part of this observation is evidently invidious; it is completely refuted by the various commendations, which the graceful and engaging manners or the poetical traveller received from the Italians: a contemptuous spirit, indeed, appears utterly incompatible with the native disposition of Milton, whose generous enthusiasm led him to conceive the fondest veneration for all, who were distinguished by ge­nius or virtue; a disposition, which he has expressed in the strongest terms, as the reader may recollect, in a letter, al­ready cited, to his friend Diodati! His prejudiced biographer endeavours to prove, that his spirit was contemptuous, by observing, that he was frugal of his praise. The argument is particularly defective, as applied to Milton on his travels; since the praises he bestowed on those accomplished fo­reigners, who were kind to him, are liberal in the highest de­gree, and apparently dictated by the heart.

After a short visit to Sienna, he resided two months in Rome, enjoying the most refined society, which that city could afford. By the favour of Holstenius, the well known librarian of the Vatican (whose kindness to him he has re­corded in a Latin Epistle equally grateful and elegant) he was recommended to the notice of Cardinal Barberini, who honoured him with the most flattering attention; it was at the concerts of the Cardinal that he was captivated by the charms of Leonora Baroni, whose extraordinary musical powers he has celebrated in Latin verse, and whom he is sup­posed to address as a lover in his Italian poetry. The most [Page 42] eloquent of the passions, which is said to convert almost every man who feels it into a poet, induced the imagination of Milton to try its powers in a foreign language, whose diffi­culties he seems to have perfectly subdued by the united aids of genius and of love.

His Italian sonnets have been liberally commended by na­tives of Italy, and one of them contains a sketch of his own character, so spirited and singular as to claim a place in this narrative.

It was at Rome that Milton was complimented, in Latin verse, by Selvaggi and Salsilli: his reply to the latter, then suffering from a severe malady, is so remarkable for its ele­gance, tenderness, and spirit, that Mr. Warton praises it as one of the finest lyrical compositions, which the Latin poetry of modern times can exhibit.

The circumstances that happened to our author in his travels, and, indeed, the most striking particulars of his life, are related by himself, in his "Second Defence." He there tells us, that in passing from Rome to Naples his fellow-traveller was a hermit, who introduced him to Baptista Manso, Marquis of Villa, an accomplished nobleman, and singularly distinguished as the friend and the biographer of two eminent poets, Tasso and Marini; they have both left poetical memorials of their esteem for the Marquis, who acquired his title as a soldier in the service of Spain, but retiring early, with considerable wealth, to Naples, his native [Page 44] city, he founded there a literary academy, and lived in splen­dor as its president.

This graceful and venerable hero, whose politeness and learning had been fondly celebrated by Tasso, in a dia­logue on friendship, that bears the name of Manso, was near eighty when Milton become his guest: he seems to have been endeared to the imagination of our poet by the liberal and affectionate tribute he had paid to the memory of his illustrious poetical friends; a tribute very feelingly described by Milton in the following lines, addressed to the noble and generous biographer—they speak first of Marini:

If the two Latin verses, in which this amiable old man ex­pressed his admiration of the young English bard, deserve the name of a "sorry distich," which Johnson bestows upon them, they still present Milton to our fancy in a most favourable light. A traveller, so little distinguished by birth or opulence, would hardly have obtained such a com­pliment from a nobleman of Manso's experience, age, and dignity, had he not been peculiarly formed to engage the good opinion and courtesy of strangers, by the expressive comeli­ness of his person, the elegance of his manners, and the charm of his conversation.

In Manso, says Milton, I found a most friendly guide, who shewed me himself the curiosities of Naples, and the palace of the Viceroy. He came more than once to visit me, while I continued in that city; and when I left it, he earnestly excused himself, that although he greatly wished to render me more good offices, he was unable to do so in Naples, because in my religion I had disdained all disguise^*

[Page 46]Pleasing and honourable as the civilities were that our young countryman received from this Nestor of Italy, he has amply repaid them in a poem, which, to the honour of English gratitude and English genius, we may justly pro­nounce superior to the compliments bestowed on this en­gaging character by the two celebrated poets, who wrote in his own language, and were peculiarly attached to him.

Of the five sonnets, indeed, that Tasso addressed to his courteous and liberal friend, two are very beautiful; but even these are surpassed, both in energy and tenderness, by the fol­lowing conclusion of a poem, inscribed to Manso, by Milton.

The preceding verses have various claims to attention; they exhibit a lively picture of the literary project that oc­cupied the mind of Milton at this period; they forcibly prove with what vehemence of desire he panted for poetical [Page 49] immortality, and for the superior rewards of a laborious life, devoted to piety and virtue.

His acquaintance with Manso may be regarded as the most fortunate incident of his foreign excursion. Nothing could have a greater tendency to preserve and strengthen the seeds of poetic enterprize in the mind of the young travel­ler, than, his familiarity with this eminent and engaging per­sonage, the bosom friend of Tasso; the friend who had che­rished that great and afflicted poet under his roof in a sea­son of his mental calamity, had restored his health, re-ani­mated his fancy, and given a religious turn to the latest efforts of his majestic muse. The very life of Tasso, which this noble biographer had written with the copious and minute fidelity of personal knowledge, and with the ardour of affectionate enthusiasm, might be sufficient to give new energy to Milton's early passion for poetical renown: his conversation had, probably, a still greater tendency to pro­duce this effect. Circumstances remote, and apparently of little moment, have often a marvellous influence on the works of imagination; nor is it too wild a conjecture to sup­pose, that the zeal of Manso, in speaking to Milton of his departed friend, might give force and permanence to that literary ambition, which ultimately rendered his aspiring guest the great rival of Tasso, and, in the estimation of Eng­lishmen, his superior.

From Naples it was the design of Milton to pass into Sicily and Greece; but receiving intelligence of the civil war in England, he felt it inconsistent with his principles to wander [Page 50] abroad, even for the improvement of his mind, while his countrymen were contending for liberty at home.

In preparing for his return to Rome, he was cautioned against it by some mercantile friends, whose letters inti­mated, that he had much to apprehend from the machina­tions of English jesuits, if he appeared again in that city; they were incensed against him by the freedom of his dis­course on topics of religion: "I had made it a rule (says Milton) never to start a religious subject in this country; but if I were questioned on my faith, never to dissemble, whatever I might suffer. I returned, nevertheless, to Rome," continues the undaunted traveller, "and, whenever I was in­terrogated, I attempted no disguise: if any one attacked my principles, I defended the true religion in the very city of the pope, and, during almost two months, with as much freedom as I had used before. By the protection of God I returned safe again to Florence, re-visiting friends, who re­ceived me as gladly as if I had been restored to my native home^*."

After a second residence of almost two months in Flo­rence, whence he made an excursion to Lucca, a place [Page 51] endeared to him by having produced the ancestors of his favourite friend Diodati, he extended his travels through Bologna and Ferrara to Venice. Here, he remained a month, and having sent hence a collection of books, and parti­cularly of music, by sea, he proceeded himself through Verona and Milan to Geneva. In this city he was parti­cularly gratified by the society and kindness of John Diodati, uncle of his young friend, whose untimely death he lamented in a Latin poem, of which we shall soon have occasion to speak. Returning by his former road through France, he reached England at a period that seems to have made a strong impression on his mind, when the king was waging, in favour of episcopacy, his unprosper­ous war with the Scots. The time of Milton's absence from his native country exceeded not, by his own account, a year and three months.

In the relation that he gives himself of his return, the name of Geneva recalling to his mind one of the most slan­derous of his political adversaries, he animates his narrative by a solemn appeal to heaven on his unspotted integrity; he protests that, during his residence in foreign scenes, where licentiousness was universal, his own conduct was perfectly irreproachable^*. I dwell the more zealously on whatever may elucidate the moral character of Milton, because, even among those who love and revere him, the splendor of the poet has in some measure eclipsed the merit of the man; but in [Page 52] proportion as the particulars of his life are studied with in­telligence and candour, his virtue will become, as it ought to be, the friendly rival of his genius, and receive its due share of admiration and esteem. Men, indeed, of narrow minds, and of servile principles, will for ever attempt to depreciate a character so absolutely the reverse of their own; but liberal spirits, who allow to others that freedom of sen­timent, which they vindicate for themselves, however they disapprove or oppose the opinions of the sectary and the republican, will render honourable and affectionate justice to the patriotic benevolence, the industry, and the courage, with which Milton endeavoured to promote what he sincerely and fervently regarded as the true interest of his country.

We have now attended him to the middle stage of his life, at which it may not be improper to pause, and make a few remarks on the years that are passed, and those that are yet in prospect. We behold him, at the age of thirty-two, recalled to England, from a foreign excursion of improvement and de­light, by a manly sense of what he owed to his country in a season of difficulty and danger. His thoughts and conduct on this occasion are the more noble and becoming, as all his preceding years had been employed in forming, for the most important purposes, a firm and lofty mind, and in furnish­ing it abundantly with whatever might be useful and ho­nourable to himself and others, in the various exigencies and vicissitudes both of private and public life. We have traced him through a long course of infantine, academical, do­mestic, and foreign study; we have seen him distinguished by application, docility, and genius; uncommonly attached [Page 53] to his instructors, and most amiably grateful to his parents; in friendship, ardent and steady; in love, though tender not intemperate; as a poet, sensible of his rare mental endow­ments, yet peculiarly modest in regard to his own produc­tions; enamoured of glory, yet as ready to bestow as anxi­ous to merit praise; in his person and manners so fashioned to prepossess all men in his favour, that even foreigners gave him credit for those high literary atchievements, which were to shed peculiar lustre on his latter days, and considered him already as a man, of whom his country might be proud.

With such accomplishments, and such expectations in his behalf, Milton returned to England. The subsequent por­tion of his life, however gloomy and tempestuous, will be found to correspond, at least in the close of it, with the ra­diant promise of his youth. We shall see him deserting his favourite haunts of Parnassus to enter the thorny paths of ecclesiastical and political dissention: his principles as a dis­putant will be condemned and approved, according to the prevalence of opposite and irreconcilable opinions, that fluctuate in the world; but his upright consistency of con­duct deserves applause from all honest and candid men of every persuasion. The Muse, indeed, who had blest him with singular endowments, and given him so lively a sense of his being constituted a poet by nature, that when he wrote not verse, he had the use (to borrow his own forcible expression) "but of his left hand;" the Muse alone might have a right to reproach him with having acted against in­ward conviction; but could his muse have visibly appeared to reprove his desertion of her service in a parental remon­strance, [Page 54] he might have answered her, as the young Harry of Shakespear answers the tender and keen reproof of his royal father,

PART II.

THE narrative may proceed from the information of Milton himself. On his return he procured a resi­dence in London, ample enough for himself and his books, and felt happy in renewing his interrupted studies^*. This first establishment (as we learn from his nephew) was a lodging in St. Bride's Church-yard, where he received, as his disciples, the two sons of his sister, John and Edward Philips; the latter is his biographer; but although he has written the life of his illustrious relation with a degree of laudable pride and affectionate spirit, he does not commu­nicate that abundance of information, which might have been expected from the advantage he possessed. In one ar­ticle his pride has a ludicrous effect, as it leads him into an awkward attempt to vindicate his uncle from the fancied opprobrium of having engaged professionally in the educa­tion of youth; a profession which, from its utility and impor­tance, [Page 56] from the talents and virtues it requires, is un­questionably entitled to respect. Philips will not allow that his uncle actually kept a school, as he taught only the sons of his particular friends. Johnson ridicules this distinction, and seems determined to treat Milton as a profest school­master, for the sake of attempting to prove, that he did not sustain the character with advantage, but adopted a vain and preposterous plan of education.

"Let me not be censured," says the Doctor, ‘as pedantic or paradoxical; for if I have Milton against me, I have Socrates on my side: it was his labour to turn philoso­phy from the study of nature to speculations upon life; but the innovators, whom I oppose, are turning off atten­tion from life to nature; they seem to think that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars; Socrates was rather of opinion, that what we had to learn was, how to do good and avoid evil.’

This insidious artifice of representing Milton and Socrates as antagonists is peculiarly unfortunate, since no man appears to have imbibed the principles of Socratic wisdom more deeply than our poet; his regard and attachment to them is fervently expressed, even in his juvenile letters; the very maxims of moral truth, which he is accused of counteract­ing, never shone with more lustre than in the following passage of the Paradise Lost:

These beautiful lines are built in some measure, as Bentley has remarked, upon a verse of Homer, the very verse admired by Socrates, which Dr. Johnson has not scrupled to quote, as a part of his singular ill-grounded attempt to prove that Milton's ideas of education were in direct opposition to those of the great moralist of Greece; an attempt that arose from a very inoffensive boast of Milton's nephew, who gives a long list of books perused by the scholars of his uncle, which merely proves, that they read more books than are usually read in our common schools; and that their diligent in­structor thought it advisable for boys, as they approach to­wards sixteen, to blend a little knowledge of the sciences with their Greek and Latin.

That he taught the familiar and useful doctrine of the Attic philosopher, even in his lighter poetry, we have a pleasing instance in the following lines of his sonnet to Syriac Skinner, who was one of his scholars:

[Page 58] But his brief treatise, addressed to Hartlib, affords, perhaps, the best proof that his ideas of moral discipline were per­fectly in unison with those of Socrates; he says, in that trea­tise, ‘I call a complete and generous education that, which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magna­nimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.’ Who can define a good education in terms more truly Socratic?

Milton, however, in his attachment to morality, forgot not the claims of religion; his Sundays were devoted to theology, and Johnson duly praises the care, with which he instructed his scholars in the primary duties of men.

With a critic so sincerely devout as Johnson unquestion­ably was, we might have hoped that the sublime piety of our author would have secured him from sarcastic attacks; but we have yet to notice two insults of this kind, which the acrimony of uncorrected spleen has lavished upon Milton as a preceptor.

"From this wonder-working academy," says the biogra­pher, ‘I do not know that there ever proceeded any man very eminent for knowledge; its only genuine product, I believe, is a small history of poetry, written in Latin by his nephew, of which, perhaps, none of my readers ever heard.’ The contemptuous spirit and the inaccuracy of this sarcasm are equally remarkable. The scholars of Mil­ton were far from being numerous. Can it be just to speak with derision of a small academy, merely because it raises no celebrated author, when we consider how few of that description every nation produces? We know little of those, [Page 59] who were under the tuition of our poet, except his two ne­phews; these were both writers; and a biographer of Mil­ton should not have utterly forgotten his obligations to Edward Philips, if he allowed no credit to his brother, for the spirited Latin treatise in which that young man ap­peared as the defender of his uncle. But the striking inac­curacy of the critic consists in not giving a just account of a book that particularly claimed his attention, Philips's Theatrum Poetarum, a book that, under a Latin title, contains in English a very comprehensive list of poets, an­cient and modern, with reflections upon many of them, particularly those of our own nation. It is remarkable that this book was licensed Sept. 14, 1674, just two months before the death of Milton, and printed the following year. The author assigns an article both to his uncle and his bro­ther. After enumerating the chief works of the former, he modestly says, ‘how far he hath revived the majesty and true decorum of heroic poesy and tragedy, it will better become a person less related than myself to deliver his judgment.’

Though he here suppresses a desire to praise his most eminent relation, it bursts forth in an amiable manner, when he comes to speak of his brother; for he calls him, ‘the maternal nephew and disciple of an author of most deserved fame, late deceased, being the exactest of heroic poets (if the truth were well examined, and it is the opi­nion of many, both learned and judicious persons) either of the ancients or moderns, either of our own or whatever nation else.’

[Page 60]I transcribe with pleasure this honest and simple eulogy; it does credit to the intelligence and affection of the poet's disciple, and it in some measure vindicates the good sense of our country, by shewing that, in the very year of Milton's decease, when some writers have supposed that his poetical merit was almost. utterly unknown, there were persons in the nation, who understood his full value.

Let us return to the author in his little academy, and the second sarcastic insult, which his biographer has bestowed upon him as the master of a school. The lodging in which he settled, on his arrival from the continent, was soon ex­changed for a more spacious house and garden, in Alders­gate-street, that supplied him with conveniencies for the reception of scholars: on this occasion Johnson exclaims, ‘let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance; on the man who hastens home, because his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and, when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school.’

To excite merriment by rendering Milton ridiculous for having preferred the pen to the sword was an enterprise that surpassed the powers of Johnson; the attempt affords a melancholy proof how far prejudice may mislead a very vigorous understanding. What but the blind hatred of bigotry could have tempted one great author to deride another, merely for having thought that he might serve his country more essentially by the rare and highly culti­vated faculties of his mind, than by the ordinary service of a [Page 61] soldier. But let us hear Milton on this subject. We have this obligation to the malice of his contemporaries, that it led him to speak publicly of himself, and to relate, in the most manly and explicit manner, the real motives of his conduct.

Speaking of the English people, in the commencement of his Second Defence, he says^*, ‘it was the just vindication of their laws and their religion, that necessarily led them into civil war; they have driven servitude from them by the most honourable arms; in which praise, though I can claim no personal share, yet I can easily defend myself from a charge of timidity or indolence, should any such be alledged against me; for I have avoided the toil and danger of military life only to render my coun­try assistance more useful, and not less to my own peril, exerting a mind never dejected in adversity, never influ­enced by unworthy terrors of detraction or of death; since from my infancy I had been addicted to literary pursuits, and was stronger in mind than in body, declining the [Page 62] duties of a camp, in which every muscular common man must have surpassed me, I devoted myself to that kind of service for which I had the greatest ability, that, with the better portion of myself, I might add all the weight I could to the pleas of my country and to this most excel­lent cause.’

He thus justifies, on the noblest ground, the line of life he pursued. In the same composition he frankly states the motives which prompted him to execute each particular work that raised him to notice in his new field of contro­versy; but before we attend to the order in which he treated various public questions that he considered of high moment to his country, it is just to observe his fidelity and tenderness in first discharging, as a poet, the duties of private friend­ship.

Before he quitted Florence, Milton received intelligence of the loss he had to sustain, by the untimely death of Charles Diodati, the favourite associate of his early studies. On his arrival in England, the bitterness of such a loss was felt with redoubled sensibility by his affectionate heart, which relieved and gratified itself by commemorating the engaging character of the deceased, in a poem of considerable length, entitled, Epitaphium Damonis, a poem mentioned by John­son with supercilious contempt, yet possessing such beauties as render it pre-eminent in that species of composition.

Many poets have lamented a friend of their youth, and a companion of their studies, but no one has surpassed the affecting tenderness with which Milton speaks of his lost Diodati.

With the spirit of a man most able to feel, and most wor­thy to enjoy, the delights of true friendship, he describes the rarity of that inestimable blessing, and the anguish we suffer from the untimely loss of it.

There is, indeed, but one effectual lenitive for wounds of this nature, which Milton happily possessed in the sincerity and fervour of his religion. He closes his lamentation for his favourite friend, as he had closed his Lycidas, with just and soothing reflections on the purity of life, by which the object of his regret was distinguished, and with a sublime conception of that celestial beatitude, which he confidently regarded as the infallible and immediate recompence of de­parted virtue.

[Page 65]Having paid what was due to friendship in his poetical capacity, he devoted his pen to public affairs, and entered on that career of controversy, which estranged him so long, and carried him so far from those milder and more engaging studies, that nature and education had made the darlings of his mind. If to sacrifice favourite pursuits that promised great glory, pursuits in which acknowledged genius had qualified an ambitious spirit to excel; if to sacrifice these to irksome disputes, from a sense of what he owed to the exi­gencies of his country; if such conduct deserve, as it assuredly does, the name of public virtue, it may be as difficult, per­haps, to find an equal to Milton in genuine patriotism as in poetical power: for who can be said to have sacrificed so much, or to have shewn a firmer affection to the public good? If he mistook the mode of promoting it; if his sen­timents, both on ecclesiastical and civil policy, are such as the majority of our countrymen think it just and wise to reject, let us give him the credit he deserves for the merit of his intention; let us respect, as we ought to do, the pro­bity of an exalted understanding, animated by a fervent, steady, and laudable desire to enlighten mankind, and to render them more virtuous and happy.

In the year 1640, when Milton returned to England, the current of popular opinion ran with great vehemence against episcopacy. He was prepared to catch the spirit of the time, and to become an advocate for ecclesiastical reforma­tion, by having peculiar and domestic grounds of complaint against religious oppression. His favourite preceptor had been reduced to exile, and his father disinherited, by into­lerance [Page 66] and superstition. He wrote, therefore, with the in­dignant enthusiasm of a man resenting the injuries of those, who are most entitled to his love and veneration. The ar­dour of his affections conspired with the warmth of his fancy to enflame him with that puritanical zeal, which blazes so intensely in his controversial productions: no less than four of these were published within two years after his return; and he thus speaks of the motives, that led him to this spe­cies of composition, in his Second Defence.

"Being ^* animated by this universal outcry against the bishops, as I perceived that men were taking the true road to liberty, and might proceed with the utmost rectitude from these beginnings to deliver human life from all base subjection, if their discipline, drawing its source from religion, proceeded to morals and political institutions; as I had been trained from my youth to the particular knowledge of what belonged to divine, and what to human jurisdiction; and as [Page 67] I thought I should deserve to forfeit the power of being useful to mankind, if I now failed to assist my country and the church, and so many brethren, who for the sake of the gospel were exposing themselves to peril, I resolved, though my thoughts had been pre-engaged by other designs, to transfer to this object all my talents and all my application: first, therefore, I wrote of reformation in England two books addressed to a friend; afterwards, when two bishops of eminence had asserted their cause against the leading mi­nisters of the opposite party, as I conceived that I could argue, from a love of truth and a sense of christian duty, not less forcibly than my antagonists (who contended for lucre and their own unjust dominion) I answered one of them in two books with the following titles, Of Prelatical Episcopacy, Of Church Government; and the other, first in Animadver­sions upon the Remonstrants Defence against Smectymnuus, and secondly, in my Apology. As the ministers were thought hardly equal to their opponent in eloquence, I lent them my aid, and from that time, if they made any farther reply, I was a party concerned."

I have inserted this passage at full length, because it gives us a clear insight into the motives of Milton on his first en­gaging in controversy, and discovers the high opinion which he entertained, both of the christian purity and the argumen­tative powers of his own cultivated mind: the two bishops to whom he alludes were, Hall bishop of Norwich, famous as our first satirist, and the learned Usher, primate of Ire­land. Hall published, in 1640, "An humble Remonstrance to the High Court of Parliament in Behalf of Episcopacy"— [Page 68] an answer to this appeared written by six ministers, under the title of Smectymnuus, a word casually formed from the initial letters of their respective names. This little band of religious writers included Thomas Young, the beloved pre­ceptor of Milton; so that personal attachment conspired with public enthusiasm to make our author vehement in his re­ply to the two bishops, who failed not to encounter the con­federate antagonists of their order. He probably recollected the sufferings of his favourite instructor, when he exclaimed in his treatise of reformation, "What numbers of faithful and free born Englishmen and good christians have been constrained to forsake their dearest home, their friends and kindred, whom nothing but the wide ocean, or the savage deserts of America, could hide and shelter from the fury of the bishops."

However furious the persecution might be, which ex­cited antipathy and abhorrence in Milton against the order of bishops, it must be confessed that he frequently speaks with that intemperance of zeal, which defeats its own pur­pose. There are some passages in his controversial writings, that must be read with concern by his most passionate ad­mirers; yet even the gloom and severity of these are com­pensated by such occasional flashes of ardent fancy, of sound argument, and of sublime devotion, as may extort commen­dation even from readers who love not the author.

In his first Ecclesiastical Treatise of Reformation, he makes the following very solemn appeal to heaven on his integrity as a writer: ‘And here withal I invoke the immortal deity, revealer and judge of secrets, that wherever I have [Page 69] in this book plainly and roundly, though worthily and truly, laid open the faults and blemishes of fathers, mar­tyrs, or christian emperors, or have otherways inveighed against error and superstition with vehement expressions, I have done it neither out of malice, nor list to speak evil, nor any vain glory, but of mere necessity, to vindicate the spotless truth from an ignominious bondage.’

Towards the close of this performance he gives a dis­tant mysterious hint of his great and unsettled poetical de­signs, with a very striking mixture of moral, political, and religious enthusiasm.

In his subsequent work, on the Reason of Church Govern­ment, he gratifies us with a more enlarged view of his lite­rary projects, not yet moulded into form, but, like the un­arranged elements of creation, now floating at large in his capacious mind.

I transcribe the long passage alluded to, because it illus­trates the mental character of Milton, with a mild energy, a solemn splendor of sentiment and expression peculiar to himself.

Mr. Warton, who has cited the last sentence of this very interesting passage, as a proof that Milton, then en­gaged in controversy, sighed for his more congenial pursuits, laments, ‘that the vigorous portion of his life, that those years in which imagination is on the wing, were un­worthily and unprofitably wasted on temporary topics.’ Many lovers of poetry will sympathise with this amiable writer in his regret; but others may still entertain very different sensations on the subject. Allowing for a moment that the controversial writings of Milton deserve to be ne­glected and forgotten, reasons may yet be found to rejoice, rather than lament, that he exerted his faculties in com­posing them. The occupation, however it might suspend his poetical enterprizes, cherished the ardour and energy of his mind, and, above all, confirmed in him that well founded and upright self-esteem, to which we are princi­pally indebted for his sublimest production. The works I allude to were, in his own estimation, indispensable and meritorious; had he not written them, as he frankly informs us, ‘he would have heard within himself, all his life after, of discourage and reproach.’ Nothing, perhaps, but this retrospect on a life passed, as his own conscience assured him, in the faithful discharge of arduous and irk­some duties, could have afforded to the declining days of Milton that confident vigour of mind, that intense and inex­tinguishable fire of imagination, which gave existence and perfection to his Paradise Lost.

[Page 74]He appears to have thought with a celebrated ancient, that perfect morality is necessary to the perfection of genius; and that sublimity in composition may be expected only from the man, who has attained the sublime in the steady practice of virtue.

These noble and animating ideas seem to have had great influence on his conduct very early in life; for in speaking of the studies and sentiments of his youth, he says,

In reply to the absurd charge of his leading a dissolute life, he gives an engaging and spirited account of his do­mestic conduct. ‘Those morning haunts are where they should be, at home; not sleeping or concocting the sur­feits of an irregular feast, but up and stirring; in winter often ere the sound of any bell awake men to labour or to devotion; in summer, as oft with the bird that first rouses, or not much tardier, to read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary, or memory have its full fraught; then with useful and generous la­bours, preserving the body's health and hardiness, to ren­der lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedience to the mind.’

[Page 75]Had the prose works of Milton no merit but that of oc­casionally affording us little sketches of his sentiments, his manners, and occupations, they would on this account be highly valuable to every reader, whom a passionate admi­ration of the poet has induced to wish for all possible ac­quaintance with the man. To gratify such readers, I se­lect very copiously from his various works those passages that display, in the strongest point of view, his moral and domestic character. It is my firm belief, that as this is more known, it will become more and more an object of affection and applause; yet I am far from surveying it with that blind idolatry, which sees no defect, or with that in­discreet partiality, which labours to hide the failing it dis­covers; a biographer must have ill understood the nature of Milton, who could suppose it possible to gratify his spirit by homage so unworthy; for my own part, I am per­suaded his attachment to truth was as sincere and fervent as that of the honest Montaigne, who says, ‘I would come again with all my heart from the other world to give any one the lie, who should report me other than I was, though he did it to honour me.’

I shall not therefore attempt to deny or to excuse the fatiguing heaviness or the coarse asperity of his ecclesiastical disputes. The sincerest friends of Milton may here agree with Johnson, who speaks of his controversial merriment as dis­gusting; but when the critic adds, such is his malignity, that "Hell grows darker at his frown," they must abhor [Page 76] this base misapplication, I had almost said, this profana­tion, of Miltonic verse.

In a controversial treatise that gave rise to such an impu­tation, we should expect to find the polemic savagely thirst­ing for the blood of his adversaries: it is just the reverse. Milton's antagonist had, indeed, suggested to the public, with infernal malignity, that he was a miscreant, ‘who ought, in the name of Christ, to be stoned to death.’ This antagonist, as Milton supposed, was a son of bishop Hall," and scrupled not to write thus outrageously against one, who (to use the milder words of our author) ‘in all his writing spake not that any man's skin should be razed.’

"The style of his piece," says Johnson, in speaking of this apology, ‘is rough, and such, perhaps, is that of his an­tagonist.’ The different degrees of roughness that the two writers displayed give a singular effect to this observa­tion of the critic, who confounds the coarse and intemperate vehemence of the one with the outrageous barbarity of the other. Milton sometimes wrote with the unguarded and ungraceful asperity of a man in wrath; but let equity add, that when he did so, he was exasperated by foes, who ex­erted against him all the persecuting ferocity of a fiend.

The incidents of his life were calculated to put his tem­per and his fortitude to the most arduous trials, and in the severest of these he will be found constant and exemplary in the exercise of gentle and beneficent virtue. From the thorns of controversy he was plunged into the still sharper thorns of connubial dissension. During the Whitsuntide of [Page 77] the year 1643, at the age of thirty-five, he married Mary, the daughter of Richard Powell, a gentleman who resided at Forest Hill, near Shotover, in Oxfordshire. This ill-starr'd union might arise from an infantine acquaintance, as the grandfather of Milton had probably lived very near the seat of the Powells. What led to the connection we can only conjecture, but we know it was unhappy, as the lady, after living only a few weeks with her husband in London, de­serted him, under the decent pretence of passing the summer months on a visit to her father, with whom the indulgent poet gave her permission to remain till Michaelmas: during the interval he was engaged in kind attention to his father, whom he now established under his own roof. The old man had been settled at Reading, with his younger son Christopher, a lawyer and a royalist, but thought it expe­dient to quit that place on its being taken by Essex, the parliamentary general, and found a comfortable asylum for the residue of his long life in the filial piety and tender protection of the poet.

At the time appointed, Milton solicited the return of his wife; she did not condescend even to answer his letter: he repeated his request by a messenger, who, to the best of my remembrance (says Philips) reported, that he was dismissed with some sort of contempt. This proceeding, in all pro­bability (continues the biographer, whose situation made him the best judge of occurrences so extraordinary) was grounded ‘upon no other cause but this, namely, that the family, being generally addicted to the cavalier party, as they called it, and some of them possibly engaged in the [Page 78] king's service, who by this time had his head-quarters at Oxford, and was in some prospect of success, they began to repent them of having matched the eldest daugh­ter of the family to a person so contrary to them in opi­nion, and thought it would be a blot in their escutcheon whenever that Court came to flourish again; however, it so incensed our author, that he thought it would be dishonourable ever to receive her again after such a repulse.’

Milton had too tender and too elevated a spirit not to feel this affront with double poignancy, as it affected both his happiness and his dignity; but it was one of his noble characteristics to find his mental powers rather invigorated than enfeebled by injury and affliction: he thought it the prerogative of wisdom to find remedies against every evil, however unexpected, by which vice or infirmity can embit­ter life. In reflecting on his immediate domestic trouble, he conceived the generous design of making it subservient to the public good. He found that in discordant marriage there is misery, for which he thought there existed a very easy remedy, and perfectly consistent both with reason and religion: with these ideas he published, in 1644, the Doc­trine and Discipline of Divorce. He addresses the work to the Parliament, with great spirit and eloquence, and after asserting the purity of his precepts, and the beneficence of his design, he says, with patriotic exultation, ‘let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live.’

[Page 79]Sanguine as Milton was in the hope of promoting the virtue and happiness of private life by this publication, the Presbyterian clergy, notwithstanding their past obligations to the author, endeavoured to persecute him for the novelty and freedom of his sentiments." The assembly of divines, ‘sitting at Westminster, impatient, says Antony Wood, of having the clergy's jurisdiction, as they reckoned it, invaded, did, instead of answering or disproving what those books had asserted, cause him to be summoned be­fore the House of Lords; but that house, whether approv­ing the doctrine, or not favouring his accusers, did soon dismiss him.’

Milton, whom no opposition could intimidate when he believed himself engaged in the cause of truth and justice, endeavoured to support his doctrine by subsequent publica­tions; first, "The Judgment of Martin Bucer concerning Divorce;" this also he addresses to the Parliament, and says, with his usual spirit, ‘God, it seems, intended to prove me, whether I durst alone take up a rightful cause against a world of disesteem, and found I durst. My name I did not publish, as not willing it should sway the reader either for me or against me; but when I was told that the stile (which what it ails to be so soon distin­guishable I cannot tell) was known by most men, and that some of the clergy began to inveigh and exclaim on what I was credibly informed they had not read, I took it then for my proper season, both to shew them a name that could easily contemn such an indiscreet kind of cen­sure, and to reinforce the question with a more accurate diligence; that if any of them would be so good as to [Page 80] leave railing, and to let us hear so much of his learning and christian wisdom, as will be strictly demanded of him in his answering to this problem, care was had he should not spend his preparations against a nameless pam­phlet.’

These expressions display the frankness and fortitude of a noble mind, perfectly conscious of its own integrity, in discussing a very delicate point, that materially affects the comfort of human life. This integrity he had indeed pro­tested very solemnly in his former Address to the Parliament, where, after asserting that the subject concerned them chiefly as redressers of grievances, he proceeds thus, ‘Me it con­cerns next, having, with much labour and faithful diligence, first found out, or at least with a fearless communicative candour first published, to the manifest good of christen­dom, that which, calling to witness every thing mortal and immortal, I believe unfeignedly to be true.’ The solemnity of this protestation, confirmed as it was by the singular regularity of his morals, and the sincerity of his zeal as a christian, could not secure him from censures of every kind, which, vehement as they were, he seems to have despised. His ideas were derided by libertines, and calum­niated by hypocrites and bigots; but, superior to ridicule and to slander, he proceeded resolutely in what he thought his duty, by shewing how completely his doctrine was con­sonant, in his own opinion, to that gospel, which he had se­dulously made not only the favourite study, but the constant guide of his life. With this view he published, in 1645, his Tetrachordon, expositions upon the four chief places of [Page 81] scripture, which speak of marriage. He introduces this work by a third Address to the Parliament, and, speaking of their justice and candour in disdaining to think of perse­cuting him for his doctrine, according to the instigation of his enemies, he expresses his gratitude in the following ani­mated terms: ‘For which uprightness and incorrupt re­fusal of what ye were incensed to, lords and commons (though it were done to justice, not to me, and was a peculiar demonstration how far your ways are different from the rash vulgar) besides those allegiances of oath and duty, which are my public debt to your public la­bours, I have yet a store of gratitude laid up, which can­not be exhausted, and such thanks, perhaps, they may live to be, as shall more than whisper to the next ages.’ This sentence is remarkable in various points of view, but chiefly as it shews us that the peculiar eagerness and energy with which Milton, at a future period, defended the parliament, originated not only in his passionate attachment to freedom, but in his ardent sense of personal gratitude to the legisla­ture of his country. He was, however, too magnanimous to wish for shelter under any authority, without vindicating his innocence and the merit of his cause; he therefore says to the parliament, in speaking of an antagonist who, in their presence, had traduced him from the pulpit, ‘I shall take licence by the right of nature, and that liberty wherein I was born, to defend myself publicly against a printed calumny, and do willingly appeal to those judges to whom I am accused.’

[Page 82]The preacher had represented the doctrine of divorce as a wicked book, for allowing other causes of divorce than Christ and his Apostles mentioned, and the parliament as sinners for not punishing its authors.

This induces Milton to exclaim with devotional spirit, which seems predominant in his mind upon every occasion, ‘First, lords and commons, I pray to that God, before whom ye then were prostrate, so to forgive ye those omissions and trespasses, which ye desire most should find forgiveness, as I shall soon shew to the world how easily ye absolve yourselves of that, which this man calls your sin, and is indeed your wisdom and nobleness, whereof to this day ye have done well not to repent.’

The scope of Milton, in his doctrine of divorce, is thus explained by himself: ‘This shall be the task and period of this discourse to prove, first, that other reasons of di­vorce besides adultery were by the law of Moses, and are yet to be allowed by the Christian magistrate, as a piece of justice, and that the words of Christ are not hereby contraried; next that, to prohibit absolutely any divorce whatsoever, except those which Moses excepted, is against the reason of law.’

This doctrine he first delivered as the result of his own diligent study of the scripture. He afterwards found and declared it consonant to what many eminent divines of the reformed church, particularly Martin Bucer and Erasmus, had maintained; lastly, to grace his opinions with the highest human support, he asserts, ‘they were sanctioned by the whole assembled authority of England, both church [Page 83] and state, and in those times which are on record for the purest and sincerest that ever shone yet on the Reforma­tion of this land, the time of Edward the Sixth. That worthy prince, having utterly abolished the canon law out of his dominions, as his father did before him, ap­pointed by full vote of parliament a committee of two and thirty chosen men, divines and lawyers, of whom Cranmer the archbishop, Peter Martyr, and Walter Had­don, not without the assistance of Sir John Cheek, the king's tutor, a man at that time accounted the learnedest of Englishmen, and for piety not inferior, were the chief to frame anew some ecclesiastical laws, that might be instead of what was abrogated. The work with great diligence was finished, and with as great approbation of that re­forming age was received, and had been doubtless, as the learned preface thereof testifies, established by act of par­liament, had not the good king's death so soon ensuing arrested the farther growth of religion also from that season to this. Those laws, thus sounded on the memo­rable wisdom and piety of that religious parliament and synod, allow divorce and second marriage not only for adultery and desertion, but for any capital enmity or plot laid against the other's life, and likewise for evil and fierce usage. Nay, the twelfth chapter of that title, by plain consequence declares, that lesser contentions, if they be perpetual, may obtain divorce, which is all one really with the position by me held in the former treatise pub­lished on this argument, herein only differing, that there the cause of perpetual strife was put, for example, in the [Page 84] unchangeable discord of some natures; but in these laws, intended us by the best of our ancestors, the effect of continual strife is determined no unjust plea of divorce, whether the cause be natural or wilful.’

The author exults so much in this authority, that he concludes with the following expressions of confidence and triumph:

I have dwelt the longer on this subject, because it occu­pied so deeply the mind and heart of Milton. In these treatises the energy of his language is very striking; it forcibly proves how keenly he felt the anguish of connu­bial infelicity, and how ardently he laboured to remove from himself and others that "secret affliction" (to use one of his own expressive phrases) ‘of an unconscionable size to hu­man strength.’

He argues, indeed, for what the majority of modern le­gislators and divines have thought inconsistent with sound morality and true religion; but they who deem his argu­ments inconclusive, may yet admire the powers and the probity of the advocate. His view of the question is as ex­tensive and liberal as his intention was pure and benevolent: if a few words of our Saviour, in their literal sense, are [Page 85] against him, the spirit of the gospel may be thought, by sin­cere Christians, to allow him all the latitude for which he contends; the most rigid opponent of his doctrine may be frequently charmed with his rich vein of fervid eloquence and christian philanthropy.

His three publications on divorce were followed by Co­lasterion, a reply to a nameless answer against his doctrine. This work is an angry invective, in which he endeavours, but not happily, to overwhelm his antagonist with ri­dicule.

In the account which he gives of his own compositions, in his Second Defence, he speaks of his treatise on divorce, as forming a part of his progressive labour to vindicate liberty in various points of view; he considered it in three dif­ferent shapes, ecclesiastical, domestic, and civil; he thought it of high moment to establish a more enlarged system of domestic liberty, at a time when connubial discord was so common, in consequence of civil dissension; when, to use his own forcible expression, alluding probably to his parti­cular situation, ‘the wife might be found in the camp of the enemy, threatening ruin and slaughter to her hus­band.’ He seems to exult in saying, that his doctrine of divorce was more abundantly demonstrated, about two years after his publication, by the illustrious Selden, in his Uxor Hebraea^*.

[Page 86]Those who love not Milton, affect to speak scornfully of his writings on this subject, and intimate, that they were re­ceived at first with universal contempt; but this was far from being the case; they were applauded by many, on whose judgment the author set the highest value, though they were made a source of indecent mirth by the vulgar; and we may reasonably conclude, it was this circumstance that induced him to wish he had written them in Latin. To the low ribaldry, with which they were attacked, he alludes in the sonnet, celebrated for the following admirable lines on the hypocritical or intemperate assertors of liberty,

This noble sentiment he has inculcated more than once in prose; and as his life was in harmony with his precept, it might have taught his enemies to avoid the gross absur­dity of representing him as the lover of anarchy and confu­sion. [Page 87] Never was a mind better constituted, than Milton's, to set a just value on the prime blessings of peace and order; if he ran into political errors, they arose not from any fond­ness for scenes of turbulence, but rather from his generous credulity respecting the virtue of mankind; from believing that many hypocrites, who affected a wish to establish peace and order in his country, on what he esteemed the surest foundation, were as sincere and disinterested as himself.

‘From this time (says Johnson) it is observed, that he became an enemy to the Presbyterians, whom he had fa­voured before. He that changes his party by his hu­mour is not much more virtuous than he that changes it by his interest; he loves himself rather than truth.’ Notwithstanding the air of morality in this remark, it may be questioned, if ever an observation was made on any great character more invidious or more unjust. When the Pres­byterians were favoured by Milton, they spake the language of the oppressed; on their being invested with power, they forgot their own pleas for liberty of conscience, and became, in their turn, persecutors; it was the consistency of virtue, therefore, in Milton, that made him at one time their advo­cate, and at another their opponent: so far from loving himself better than truth, he was perhaps of all mortals the least selfish.—He contended for religion without seeking emoluments from the church; he contended for the state without aiming at any civil or military employment: truth and justice were the idols of his heart and the study of his life; if he sometimes failed of attaining them, it was not because he loved any thing better; it was because he over­shot [Page 88] the object of his sincere affection from the fondness and ardour of his pursuit.

His wife still persisted in her desertion, but he amused his mind under the mortification her conduct had occasioned by frequent visits to the Lady Margaret Ley, whose man­ners and conversation were peculiarly engaging. Her father, the Earl of Marlborough, had held the highest offices in a former reign, and of his virtues she used to speak with such filial eloquence as inspired Milton with a sonnet in her praise.

He continued also to manifest his firm affection to the public good, by two compositions intended to promote it; the little tractate on education, addressed to Mr. Hartlib, who had requested his thoughts upon that interesting sub­ject, and his Areopagitica, a speech for the liberty of un­licenced printing. The latter has been re-printed, with a spirited preface by Thomson, a poet whom a passion for freedom, united to genius, had highly qualified as an editor and eulogist of Milton.

Had the author of the Paradise Lost left us no composi­tion but his Areopagitica, he would be still entitled to the affectionate veneration of every Englishman, who exults in that intellectual light, which is the noblest characteristic of his country, and for which England is chiefly indebted to the liberty of the press. Our constant advocate for free­dom, in every department of life, vindicated this most im­portant privilege with a mind fully sensible of its value; he poured all his heart into this vindication, and, to speak of his work in his own energetic language, we may justly [Page 89] call it, what he has defined a good book to be, ‘the pre­cious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.’

His late biographer, instead of praising Milton for a service so honourably rendered to literature, seems rather desirous of annihilating its merit, by directing his sarcastic animosity against the liberty of the press. ‘It seems not more rea­sonable,’ says Johnson, ‘to leave the right of printing unrestrained, because writers may be afterwards censured, than it would be to sleep with doors unbolted, because by our laws we can hang a thief.’

This is servile sophistry; the author's illustration of a thief may be turned against himself. To suffer no book to be published without a licence, is tyranny as absurd as it would be to suffer no traveller to pass along the highway without producing a certificate that he is not a robber.

Even bad books may have their use, as Milton observes; and I mention this observation, chiefly to shew how liberally he introduces a just compliment to a great author of his own time, in support of this idea. "What better witness," says the advocate for unlicenced printing, ‘can ye expect I should produce, than one of your own, now sitting in par­liament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land, Mr. Selden, whose volume of natural and national laws proves, not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquisite reasons and theorems almost mathematically demonstrative, that all opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service and assistance to­wards the speedy attainment of what is truest.’ This [Page 90] eulogy alone appears sufficient to refute a remark unfriendly to Milton, that he was frugal of his praise; such frugality will hardly be found united to a benevolent heart and a glowing imagination.

In 1645, his early poems, both English and Latin, were first published in a little volume by Humphry Mosely, who informs the reader in his advertisement, that he had obtained them by solicitation from the author, regarding him as a successful rival of Spencer.

Milton had now passed more than three years in that sin­gular state of mortification, which the disobedience of his wife occasioned. His time had been occupied by the incessant exercise of his mental powers; but he probably felt with peculiar poignancy ‘A craving void left aching in the breast.’ As he entertained serious thoughts of enforcing, by his own example, his doctrine of divorce, and of marrying another wife, who might be worthy of the title, he paid his addresses to the daughter of Doctor Davies: the father seems to have been a convert to Milton's arguments; but the lady had scruples. She possessed, according to Philips, both wit and beauty. A novelist could hardly imagine circum­stances more singularly distressing to sensibility, than the situation of the poet, if, as we may reasonably conjecture, he was deeply enamoured of this lady; if her father was inclined to accept him as a son-in-law; and if the object of his love had no inclination to reject his suit, but what arose from a dread of his being indissolubly united to another.

[Page 91]Perhaps Milton alludes to what he felt on this occasion in those affecting lines of Paradise Lost, where Adam, pro­phetically enumerating the miseries to arise from woman, says, in closing the melancholy list, that man sometimes

However strong the scruples of his new favourite might have been, it seems not improbable that he would have tri­umphed over them, had not an occurrence, which has the air of an incident in romance, given another turn to the emotions of his heart. While he was conversing with a re­lation, whom he frequently visited in St. Martin's-lane, the door of an adjoining apartment was suddenly opened: he beheld his repentant wife kneeling at his feet, and imploring his forgiveness. After the natural struggles of honest pride and just resentment, he forgave and received her, ‘partly from the intercession of their common friends, and partly,’ says his nephew, ‘from his own generous nature, more inclinable to reconciliation, than to perseverance in anger and revenge,’

Fenton justly remarks, that the strong impression which this interview must have made on Milton ‘contributed much to the painting of that pathetic scene in Paradise Lost, in which Eve addresses herself to Adam for pardon [Page 92] and peace;’ the verses, charming as they are, acquire new charms, when we consider them as descriptive of the poet himself and the penitent destroyer of his domestic comfort.

It has been said, that Milton resembled his own Adam in the comeliness of his person; but he seems to have re­sembled him still more in much nobler endowments, and particularly in uniting great tenderness of heart to equal dignity of mind. Soon after he had pardoned, and lived again with his wife, he afforded an asylum, in his own house, to both her parents, and to their numerous family. They were active royalists, and fell into great distress by the ruin of their party: these were the persons who had not only treated Milton with contemptuous pride, but had imbittered his existence for four years, by instigating his wife to persist in deserting him. The mother, as Wood intimates, was his greatest enemy, and occasioned the perverse conduct of her daughter. The father, though sumptuous in his mode of life when he first received Milton as his son-in-law, had [Page 93] never paid the marriage portion of a thousand pounds, ac­cording to his agreement, and was now stript of his property by the prevalence of the party he had opposed. On persons thus contumelious and culpable towards him, Milton be­stowed his favour and protection. Can the records of pri­vate life exhibit a more magnanimous example of forgiveness and beneficence?

At the time of his wife's unexpected return, he was pre­paring to remove from Aldersgate to a larger house in Bar­bican, with a view of increasing the number of his scholars. It was in this new mansion that he received the forgiven penitent, and provided a refuge for her relations, whom he retained under his roof, according to Fenton, ‘till their affairs were accommodated by his interest with the victo­rious party.’

They left him soon after the death of his father, who ended a very long life, in the year 1647, and not without the gratification, peculiarly soothing to an affectionate old man, of bestowing his benediction on a grand-child; for, within the year of Milton's re-union with his wife, his family was increased by a daughter, Anne, the eldest of his children, born July 29th, 1646.

When his apartments were no longer occupied by the guests, whom he had so generously received, he admitted more scholars; but their number was small, and Philips imagines, that he was induced to withdraw himself from the business of education by a prospect of being appointed ad­jutant general in Sir William Waller's army: whatever might have been the motive for his change of life, he quit­ted [Page 94] his large house in Barbican for a smaller in Holborn, ‘among those (says his nephew) that open backwards into Lincoln's Inn Fields,’ where he lived, according to the same author, in great privacy, and perpetually engaged in a variety of studies.

Three years elapsed without any new publication from his pen; a silence which the various affecting occurrences in his family would naturally produce. In 1649 he published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; and in his sum­mary account of his own writings, he relates the time and occasion of this performance. He declares, that without any personal malevolence against the deceased monarch, who had been tried and executed before this publication appeared, it was written to compose the minds of the peo­ple, disturbed by the duplicity and turbulence of certain presbyterian ministers, who affected to consider the sen­tence against the king as contrary to the principles of every protestant church, ‘a falsehood (says Milton) which, with­out inveighing against Charles, I refuted by the testimony of their most eminent theologians^*.’

[Page 95]His observations on the articles of peace between the Earl of Ormond and the Irish papists appeared in the same year; a performance that he probably thought too in­considerable to enumerate in his own account of what he had published; it includes, however, some remarkably keen strictures on a letter written by Ormond, to tempt Colonel Jones, the governor of Dublin, to desert the Parliament, who had intrusted him with his command. Ormond, hav­ing imputed to the prevailing party in England a design to establish a perfect Turkish tyranny, Milton, with great dex­terity, turns the expression against Ormond, observing, that the design of bringing in that tyranny is a monarchical de­sign, and not of those who have dissolved monarchy. ‘Witness (says he) that consultation had in the court of France, under Charles the IXth, at Blois, wherein Poncet, a certain court projector, brought in secretly by the chan­cellor Biragha, after many praises of the Ottoman go­vernment, proposes ways and means at large, in the presence of the king, the queen regent, and An­jou the king's brother, how, with best expedition and least noise, the Turkish tyranny might be set up in France.’ I transcribe the passage as an example of Milton's applying historical anecdotes with peculiar felicity.

He now began to employ himself in one of the great works, with which he hoped to enrich his native language. The sketch that he has drawn of himself and his studies, at this period, is so interesting and honourable, that it would [Page 96] be injurious not to translate the Latin expressions to which I allude.

‘Having now a prospect of abundant leisure, I directed my studies to the history of my country, which I began from its remotest source, and intended to bring down, if possible, in a regular process, to the present times. I [Page 97] had executed four books, when, on the settlement of the republic, the council of state, then first established by the authority of parliament, called me most unex­pectedly to its service, and wished to employ me chiefly in its foreign concerns.’ It has not yet, I believe, been ascertained to whom Milton was particularly indebted for a public appointment. ‘He was (says Wood) without any seeking of his, by the endeavours of a private acquaint­ance, who was a member of the new council of state, chosen Latin secretary.’ The new council consisted of thirty-nine members, including two persons, whom we may suppose equally inclined to promote the interest of Milton; these were Serjeant Bradshaw and Sir Harry Vane the younger: it seems probable that he owed his station of se­cretary to the former, since, in his Second Defence, he men­tions him as a friend entitled to his particular regard, and draws his character in colours so vivid, that the portrait may be thought worthy of preservation, even by those who have no esteem for the original.

The character of a man so extraordinary, derived from personal intimacy, and delineated by a hand so powerful, can hardly fail to be interesting; yet it becomes still more so, if we consider it as a monument of Milton's gratitude to the friend who fixed him in that public station, which gave signal exercise to the energy of his mind, and first made him, as a Latin writer, the admiration of Europe.

Whatever influence gratitude might have on the descrip­tion, and however different the ideas may be, that are com­monly entertained of Bradshaw, the eulogy bestowed on him [Page 98] by Milton was certainly sincere; for though not frugal of his praise, yet such was his probity, that it may, I think, be fairly proved, he never bestowed a particle of applause where he did not think it deserved; a point that I hope to establish, by refuting, in the course of this narrative, the charge of servile flattery, which he is falsely accused of hav­ing lavished upon Cromwell.

To praise, indeed, appears to have been an occupation peculiarly suited to his spirit, which was naturally sanguine, free from the gloom of sarcastic melancholy, and ever ready to glow with affectionate enthusiasm. His character of Bradshaw may illustrate this remark; it is written with peculiar elegance and affection; the following portion of it will be sufficient to shew, not only the fervency of his friendship, but his facility and force of pencil in the delinea­tion of character^*.

[Page 100]A writer of a sanguine imagination, who delineates a public character he admires in the glowing colours of affection, has rarely the good fortune to find the personage whom he has praised acting in perfect conformity to his panegyric; but Milton, in one particular circumstance, had this rare felicity, in regard to the friend whom he so fer­vently commended; for Bradshaw resisted the tyrannical orders of Cromwell, in the plenitude of his power, with such firmness, that we might almost suppose him animated by a desire to act up to the letter of the eulogy, with which he had been honoured by the eloquence and the esteem of Milton. This will sufficiently appear by the following anecdote in Ludlow's Memoirs, who, after speaking of Oli­ver's usurpation, and the universal terror he inspired, relates how he himself was summoned, with Bradshaw, Sir Henry Vane, and colonel Rich, to appear before the usurper in council. ‘Cromwell (says Ludlow) as soon as he saw the lord president, required him to take out a new com­mission for his office of chief justice of Chester, which he refused, alledging that he held that place by a grant from the parliament of England, to continue, 'quamdiu se bene gesserit;' and whether he had carried himself with that integrity, which his commission exacted, he was ready to submit to a trial by twelve Englishmen, to be chosen even by Cromwell himself.’

This opposition to the usurper was assuredly magnani­mous, and the more so as Bradshaw persisted in it, and actually went his circuit as chief justice without paying any regard to what Cromwell had required. The odium which [Page 101] the president justly incurred in the trial of Charles seems to have prevented even our liberal historians from record­ing with candour the great qualities he possessed: he was undoubtedly not only an intrepid but a sincere enthusiast in the cause of the commonwealth. His discourse on his death-bed is a sanction to his sincerity; he regarded it as meritorious to have pronounced sentence on his king, in those awful moments when he was passing himself to the tribunal of his God. Whatever we may think of his po­litical tenets, let us render justice to the courage and the consistency with which he supported them.—The mind of Milton was in unison with the high-toned spirit of this re­solute friend, and we shall soon see how little ground there is to accuse the poet of servility to Cromwell; but we have first to notice the regular series of his political com­positions.

Soon after his public appointment, he was requested by the council to counteract the effect of the celebrated book, entitled, Icon Basilike, the Royal Image, and in 1649 he published his Iconoclastes, the Image Breaker. The saga­city of Milton enabled him to discover, that the pious work imputed to the deceased king was a political artifice to serve the cause of the royalists; but as it was impossible for him to obtain such evidence to detect the imposition as time has since produced, he executed a regular reply to the book, as a real production of the king, intimating at the same time his suspicion of the fraud.

This reply has recently drawn on the name of Milton much liberal praise, and much injurious obloquy, A Scot­tish [Page 102] critic of great eminence, Lord Monboddo, has celebrated the opening of the Iconoclastes as a model of English prose, or, to use his own just expressions, ‘a specimen of noble and manly eloquence.’ Johnson, from the same work, takes occasion to insinuate, that Milton was a dishonest man. A charge so serious, and from a moralist who professed such an attachment to truth, deserves some discussion. ‘As fac­tion (says the unfriendly biographer) seldom leaves a man honest, however it might find him, Milton is suspected of having interpolated the book called Icon Basilike, by in­serting a prayer taken from Sidney's Arcadia, and im­puting it to the king, whom he charges, in his Iconoclastes, with the use of this prayer as with a heavy crime, in the indecent language with which prosperity had em­boldened the advocates for rebellion to insult all that is venerable and great.’

A simple question will show the want of candour in this attempt to impeach the moral credit of Milton. By whom is he suspected of this dishonesty? His severe biographer sinks the name of his own old and dishonourable associate in de­preciating Milton, and does not inform us that it was the in­famous Lauder, who, having failed to blast the reputation of the poet, with equal impotence and fury pursued his attack against the probity of the man in an execrable pamphlet entitled ‘King Charles the First vindicated from the Charge of Plagiarism brought against him by Milton, and Milton himself convicted of Forgery.’ Instead of naming Lauder, who persisted in trying to substantiate this most improbable charge, Johnson would insidiously lead us to believe, that [Page 103] the respectable Dr. Birch supported it, though Birch, who had indeed printed, in the appendix to his Life of Milton, the idle story which Lauder urges as a proof of Milton's imposture, had properly rejected that story from the im­proved edition of his work, and honourably united with another candid biographer of the poet, the learned bishop of Bristol, in declaring that ‘such contemptible evidence is not to be admitted against a man, who had a soul above being guilty of so mean an action.’

There are some calumnies so utterly despicable and ab­surd, that to refute them elaborately is almost a disgrace: did not the calumny I am now speaking of belong to this description, it might be here observed, that a writer who published remarks on Johnson's Life of Milton, in which the asperity of that biographer is opposed with superior asperity, has proved, with new arguments, the futility of the charge in question. Instead of repeating these, let me ob­serve, that the attempt of Johnson to revive a base and suffi­ciently refuted imputation against the great author whose life he was writing, is one of the most extraordinary proofs that literature can exhibit how far the virulence of political ha­tred may pervert a very powerful mind, even a mind which makes moral truth its principal pursuit, and assiduously la­bours to be just. This remark is not made in enmity to Johnson, but to shew how cautious the most cultivated understanding should be in watching the influence of any hostile prejudice. Milton himself may be also urged as an example to enforce the same caution; for though he was certainly no impostor in imputing the prayer in question to [Page 104] the king, yet his considering the king's use of it as an of­fence against heaven, is a pitiable absurdity; an absurdity as glaring as it would be to affirm, that the divine poet is him­self profane in assigning to a speech of the Almighty, in his poem, the two following verses:

Because they are partly borrowed from a line in Virgil, ad­dressed by a heathen goddess to her child: ‘Nate, meae vires, mea magna potentia solus.’

The heat of political animosity could thus throw a mist over the bright intellects of Milton; yet his Iconoclastes, taken all together, is a noble effort of manly reason; it un­canonized a fictitious saint, who assuredly had no pretension to the title.

Having thus signalized himself as the literary antagonist of Charles, when the celebrated Salmasius was hired to ar­raign the proceedings of England against him, every mem­ber of the English council turned his eyes upon Milton as the man from whose spirit and eloquence his country might expect the most able vindication. In 1651, he published his defence of the people, the most elaborate of all his Latin compositions; the merits and defects of this signal perform­ance might be most properly discussed in a preliminary dis­course to the prose works of Milton; here I shall only re­mark, that in the composition of it he gave the most singu­lar [Page 105] proof of genuine public spirit that ever patriot had occasion to display; since, at the time of his engaging in this work, the infirmity in his eyes was so alarming, that his physicians assured him he must inevitably lose them if he persisted in his labour. "On this occasion," (says Milton to a savage antagonist, who had reproached him with blind­ness) ‘^*I reflected that many had purchased with a supe­rior evil a lighter good, glory with death; to me, on the contrary, greater good was proposed with an inferior evil; so that, by incurring blindness alone, I might fulfil the most honourable of all duties, which, as it is a more solid advantage than glory itself, ought to be more eligible in the estimation of every man; I resolved therefore to make what short use I might yet have of my eyes as conducive as possible to public utility: you see what I preferred, and what I lost, with the principle on which I acted; let slan­derers therefore cease to talk irreverently on the judgment of God, and to make me the subject of their fictions; let them know that I am far from considering my lot with [Page 106] sorrow or repentance; that I persist immovable in my sentiment; that I neither fancy nor feel the anger of God, but, on the contrary, experience and acknowledge his paternal clemency and kindness in my most import­ant concerns, in this especially, that, by the comfort and confirmation which he himself infuses into my spirit, I ac­quiesce in his divine pleasure, continually considering rather what he has bestowed upon me, than what he has denied. Finally, that I would not exchange the consciousness of my own conduct for their merit, whatever it may be, or part with a remembrance, which is to my own mind a perpetual source of tranquillity and satisfaction.’

Whenever he is induced to mention himself, the purity and vigour of Milton's mind appear in full lustre, whether he speaks in verse or in prose: the preceding passage from his Second Defence is consonant to the sonnet on his blind­ness, addressed to Syriac Skinner, which, though different critics have denied the author to excel in this minute species of composition, has hardly been surpassed; it deserves dou­ble praise for energy of expression and heroism of senti­ment.

The ambition of Milton was as pure as his genius was sublime; his first object on every occasion was to merit the approbation of his conscience and his God; when this most important point was secured, he seems to have indulged the predominant passion of great minds, and to have exulted, with a triumph proportioned to his toil, in the celebrity he acquired: he must have been insensible indeed to public applause, had he not felt elated by the signal honours which were paid to his name in various countries, as the eloquent defender of the English nation. "^*This I can truly affirm," (says Milton, in mentioning the reception of his great political performance) ‘that as soon as my defence of the people was published, and read with avidity, there was not, in our metropolis, any ambassador from any state or sovereign, who did not either congratulate me if we met by chance, or express a desire to receive me at his house, or visit me at mine.’

[Page 108]Toland relates, that he received from the parliament a pre­sent of a thousand pounds for the defence. The author does not include this circumstance among the many particulars he mentions of himself; and if such a reward was ever be­stowed upon him, it must have been after the publication of his Second Defence, in which he affirms, that he was con­tent with having discharged what he considered as an ho­nourable public duty, without aiming at a pecuniary re­compence; and that instead of having acquired the opu­lence with which his adversary reproached him, he re­ceived not the slightest gratuity for that production^*. Yet he appears to have been perfectly satisfied with the kind­ness of his associates; for, in speaking of his blindness, he says, that ‘far from being neglected on this account by the highest characters in the republic, they constantly re­garded him with indulgence and favour, not seeking to deprive him either of distinction or emolument, though his powers of being useful were diminished;’ hence he compares himself to an ancient Athenian, supported by a decree of honour at the expence of the public^†. Among the foreign compliments he received, the applause of [Page 109] Christina afforded him the highest gratification; for he re­garded it as an honourable proof of what he had ever affirmed, that he was a friend to good sovereigns, though an enemy to tyrants: he understood that the queen of Sweden had made this distinction in commending his book, and in the warmth of his gratitude he bestowed on the northern princess a very splendid panegyric, of which the subsequent conduct of that singular and fantastic personage too clearly proved her unworthy; yet Milton cannot fairly be charged with servile adulation. Christina, when he appeared as her eulogist, was the idol of the literary world. The candour with which she spake as a queen on his defence of the people would naturally strike the author as an engaging proof of her discernment and magnanimity; he was also gratified in no common degree by the coolness with which she treated his adversary; for Salmasius, whom she had in­vited to her court for his erudition, was known to have lost her favour, when his literary arrogance and imbecility were exposed and chastised by the indignant spirit or Milton. The wretched Salmasius, indeed, was utterly overwhelmed in the encounter: he had quitted France, his native country, where he honourably disdained to purchase a pension by flattering the tyranny of Richlieu, and had settled in Leyden as an asylum of liberty; he seemed, therefore, as one of his Parisian correspondents observed to him, ‘to cancel the merit of his former conduct by writing against England.’ Salmasius was extravagantly vain, and trusted too much to his great reputation as a scholar; his antagonist, on the contrary, was so little known as a Latin writer before the [Page 110] defence appeared, that several friends advised Milton not to hazard his credit against a name so eminent as that of Salmasuis, Never did a literary conflict engage the atten­tion of a wider circle; and never did victory declare more decidedly in favour of the party from whom the public had least expectation. Perhaps no author ever acquired a more rapid and extensive celebrity than Milton gained by this contest. Let us however remark, for the interest of litera­ture, that the two combatants were both to blame in their reciprocal use of weapons utterly unworthy of the great cause that each had to sustain; not content to wield the broad and bright sword of national argument, they both descended to use the mean and envenomed dagger of per­sonal malevolence. They have indeed great authorities of modern time to plead in their excuse, not to men­tion the bitter disputants or antiquity. It was the opinion of Johnson, and Milton himself seems to have entertained the same idea, that it is allowable in literary contention to ridicule, vilify, and depreciate as much as possible the cha­racter of an opponent. Surely this doctrine is unworthy of the great names who have endeavoured to support it, both in theory and practice; a doctrine not only morally wrong, but prudentially defective; for a malevolent spirit in elo­quence is like a dangerous varnish in painting, which may produce, indeed, a brilliant and forcible effect for a time, but ultimately injures the success of the production; a re­mark that may be verified in perusing the Latin prose of Milton, where elegance of language and energy of sentiment [Page 111] suffer not a little from being blended with the tiresome as­perity of personal invective.

It is a pleasing transition to return from his enemies to his friends. He had a mind and heart peculiarly alive to the duties and delights of friendship, and seems to have been peculiarly happy in this important article of human life. In speaking of his blindness, he mentions, in the most interesting manner, the assiduous and tender attention, which he re­ceived on that occasion from his friends in general; some of them he regarded as not inferior in kindness to Theseus and Pylades, the ancient demigods of amity. We have lost, perhaps, some little poems that flowed from the heart of Milton, by their being addressed to persons who, in the vicissitudes of public fortune, were suddenly plunged into obscurity with the honours they had received. Some of his sonnets that we possess did not venture into public till many years after the death of their author for political reasons; others might be concealed from the same motive, and in such concealment they might easily perish. I can hardly believe that he never addressed a verse to Bradshaw, whom we have seen him praising so eloquently in prose; and among those whom he mentions with esteem in his Latin works, there is a less known military friend, who seems still more likely to have been honoured with some tribute of the poet's affection, that time and chance may have destroyed; I mean his friend Overton, a soldier of eminence in the service of the parliament, whom Milton describes ‘as endeared to him through many years by the similitude of their pursuits, by the sweetness of his man­ners, [Page 112] and by an intimacy surpassing even the union of brothers^*.’ A character so highly and tenderly esteemed by the poet has a claim to the attention of his biographer. Overton is commended by the frank ingenuous Ludlow as a brave and faithful officer; he is also ridiculed in a ballad of the royalists as a religious enthusiast. He had a gratuity of 300l. a year conferred on him for his bravery by the parliament, and had risen to the rank of a major general. Cromwell, apprehensive that Overton was conspiring against his usurpation, first imprisoned him in the tower, and after­wards confined him in the island of Jersey. A letter, in which Marvel relates to Milton his having presented to the Protector at Windsor a recent copy of the Second Defence, expresses at the same time an affectionate curiosity concern­ing the business of Overton, who was at that time just brought to London by a mysterious order of Cromwell. He did not escape from confinement till after the death of Oliver, when, in consequence of a petition from his sister to the parliament, he obtained his release. Soon after the restoration, he was again imprisoned in the Tower with Colonel Desborow, on a rumour of their being concerned in a treasonable commotion; but as that rumour seems to have been a political device of the royalists, contrived to strengthen the new government, he probably regained his freedom, though we know not how his active days were concluded. The anxiety and anguish that Milton must have indured in the various calamities to which his friends [Page 113] were exposed on the vicissitude of public affairs, formed, I apprehend, the severest sufferings of his extraordinary life, in which genius and affliction seem to have contended for pre-eminence.

Some traces of the sufferings I allude to, though myste­riously veiled, are yet visible in his poetry, and will be no­ticed hereafter. Not to anticipate the severest evil of his destiny, let me now speak of a foreign friend, in whose lively regard he found only honour and delight, On the publication of his defence, Leonard Philaras, a native of Athens, who had distinguished himself in Italy, and risen to the rank of envoy from the duke of Parma to the court of France, conceived a flattering desire to cultivate the friendship of Milton. With this view he sent him his por­trait, with very engaging letters, and the highest commen­dation of the recent defence. The reply of Milton is re­markable for its elegance and spirit; after thanking his correspondent for presents so agreeable, he says, ‘^*If [Page 114] Alexander in the midst of his martial toil confessed, that he laboured but to gain an eulogy from Athens, I may think myself fortunate indeed, and esteem it as the highest honour, to be thus commended by the man in whom alone the genius and virtue of the ancient Athenians seem, after so long an interval, to revive and flourish. As your city has produced many most eloquent men, I am per­fectly willing to confess, that whatever proficiency I have made in literature is chiefly owing to my long and in­cessant study of their works. Had I acquired from them such powers of language as might enable me to stimulate our fleets and armies to deliver Greece, the native seat of eloquence, from the tyranny of the Turks (a splendid enterprize, for which you almost seem to implore our assistance) I would assuredly do what would then be among the first objects of my desire; for what did the bravest or most eloquent men of antiquity consider as more glorious or more worthy of themselves, than by per­suasive language or bold exploits to render the Greeks free, and their own legislators.’ He closes his letter by observing very justly, that ‘it is first necessary to kindle in the minds of the modern Greeks the spirit and virtue of their ancestors,’ (politely adding) that ‘if this could be accomplished by any man, it might be most reasonably [Page 115] expected from the patriotic enthusiasm, and the expe­rience, civil and military, of his accomplished correspon­dent.’ This letter is dated June, 1652. Milton had soon afterwards the gratification of a visit from this liberal Athenian, who took so tender an interest in the blindness of his friend, that, on his return to Paris, he wrote to him on the subject. The following answer of Milton relates the particulars of his disorder, and shews at the same time with what cheerful magnanimity he supported it.

We have no reason to imagine that Milton received any kind of medical benefit from the friendly intention of this amiable foreigner. Strange as the idea may at first appear, perhaps it was better for him, as a man and as a poet, to remain without a cure; for his devout tenderness and energy of mind had so far converted his calamity into a blessing, that it seems rather to have promoted than ob­structed both the happiness of his life and the perfection of his genius. We have seen, in the admirable sonnet on his blindness, how his reflections on the conscientious labour by which he lost his eyes gave a dignified satisfaction to his spirit. In one of his prose works he expresses a sentiment on the same subject, that shews, in the most striking point of view, the meekness and sublimity of his devotion. He exults in his misfortune, and feels it endeared to him by the persuasion, that to be blind is to be placed more imme­diately [Page 120] under the conduct and providence of God^*: when regarded in this manner, it could not fail to quicken and invigorate his mental powers. Blindness, indeed, without the aid of religious enthusiasm, has a natural tendency to favour that undisturbed, intense, and continual meditation, which works of magnitude require. Perhaps we sometimes include in the catalogue of disadvantages the very circum­stances that have been partly instrumental in leading ex­traordinary men to distinction. In examining the lives of illustrious scholars we may discover, that many of them arose to glory by the impulse of personal misfortune; Bacon and Pope were deformed; Homer and Milton were blind.

It has been frequently remarked, that the blind are gene­rally cheerful; it is not therefore marvellous that Milton was very far from being dispirited by the utter extinction of his sight; but his unconquerable vigour of mind was sig­nally displayed in continuing to labour under all the pains and inconveniencies of approaching blindness, a state pecu­liarly unfavourable to mental exertion.

[Page 121]From the very eloquent preface to his Defence we learn, that while he was engaged on that composition, and eager to throw into it all the force of his exalted mind, ‘his in­firmity obliged him to work only by starts, and scarce to touch, in short periods of study broken by hourly in­terruptions, what he wished to pursue with continued application^*.’ In this most uneasy and perilous labour he exerted his failing eyes to the utmost, and, to repeat his own triumphant expression,

His left eye became utterly blind in 1651, the year in which the book that he alludes to was published, and he lost the use of the other in 1654, the year in which he wrote concerning his blindness to his Athenian friend. In this interval he repeatedly changed his abode. As every spot inhabited by such a man acquires a sort of consecration in the fancy of his admirers, I shall here transcribe from his nephew the particulars of his residence.

‘First he lodged at one Thomson's, next door to the Bull Head tavern at Charing Cross, opening into th [...] [Page 122] Spring Garden, which seems to have been only a lodging taken till his designed apartment in Scotland Yard was prepared for him; for hither he soon removed from the aforesaid place, and here his third child, a son, was born, which, through the ill-usage or bad constitution of an ill-chosen nurse, died an infant. From this apartment, whether he thought it not healthy or otherwise conve­nient for his use, or whatever else was the reason, he soon after took a pretty garden-house in Petty France, in Westminster, next door to the Lord Scudamore's, and opening into St. James's Park, where he remained no less than eight years, namely, from the year 1652 till within a few weeks of King Charles the Second's resto­ration.’

Philips also informs us, that while his uncle lodged at Thomson's he was employed in revising and polishing the Latin work of his youngest nephew John, who, on the publication of a severe attack upon Milton, ascribed to Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, vindicated his illustrious rela­tion, and satirized his supposed adversary with a keenness and vehemence of invective, which induced, perhaps, some readers to suspect that the performance was written entirely by Milton. The traces, however, of a young hand are evi­dent in the work; and John Philips, at the time it ap­peared, 1652, was a youth of nineteen or twenty, eager (as he declares) to engage unsolicited in a composition, which, however abounding in juvenile defects, proves him attached to his country, and grateful to his friends.

[Page 123]In 1654, Milton, now utterly blind, appeared again in the field of controversy, first, in his Second Defence of the English People, and the following year in a defence of himself, "Autoris pro se Defensio." The first of these productions is in truth his own vindication; it is the work in which he speaks most abundantly of his own character and conduct; it displays that true eloquence of the heart, by which probity and talents are enabled to defeat the malevolence of an insolent accuser; it proves that the mind of this wonderful man united to the poetic imagination of Homer the argumentative energy of Demosthenes.

It must however be allowed, that while Milton defended himself with the spirit of the Grecian orator, in imitating the eloquent Athenian he promiscuously caught both his merits and defects. It is to be regretted, that these mighty masters of rhetoric permitted so large an alloy of personal virulence to debase the dignity of national argument; yet as the great orators of an age more humanized are apt, we see, to be hurried into the same failing, we may conclude that it is almost inseparable from the weakness of nature, and we must not expect to find, though we certainly should endea­vour to introduce, the charity of the Gospel in political contention.

If the utmost acrimony of invective could in any case be justified, it might assuredly be so by the calumnies which hurried both Demosthenes and Milton into those intempe­rate expressions, which appear in their respective vindica­tions like specks of a meaner mineral in a mass of the richest ore. The outrages that called forth the vindictive [Page 124] thunders of the eloquent Athenian are sufficiently known. The indignation of Milton was awakened by a Latin work, published at the Hague in 1652, entitled, "Regii San­guinis Clamor ad Caelum;" The Cry of Royal Blood to Heaven. In this book all the bitter terms of abhorrence and reproach, with which the malignity of passion can dis­honour learning, were lavished on the eloquent defender of the English commonwealth. The secret author of this scur­rility was Peter du Moulin, a Protestant divine, and son of a French author, whom the biographers of his own country describe as a satirist without taste and a theologian without temper. Though du Moulin seems to have inherited the acrimonious spirit of his father, he had not the courage to publish himself what he had written as the antagonist of Milton, but sent his papers to Salmasius, who entrusted them to Alexander More, a French protestant of Scotch ex­traction, and a divine, who agreed in his principles with the author of the manuscript.

Most unfortunately for his own future comfort, More published, without a name, the work of Du Moulin, with a dedication to Charles the Second, under the signature of Ulac, the Dutch printer. He decorated the book with a portrait of Charles, and applied at the same time to Milton the Virgilian delineation of Polypheme:

[Page 125] Never was a savage insult more completely avenged; for Milton, having discovered that More was unquestionably the publisher of the work, considered him as its author, which, according to legal maxims, he had a right to do, and in return exposed, with such severity of reproof, the irregular and licentious life of his adversary, that, losing his popula­rity as a preacher, he seems to have been overwhelmed with public contempt.

There is a circumstance hitherto unnoticed in this con­troversy, that may be considered as a proof of Milton's in­dependent and inflexible spirit. More having heard acci­dentally, from an acquaintance of the English author, that he was preparing to expose him as the editor of the scurri­lous work he had published, contrived to make great interest in England, first, to prevent the appearance, and again, to soften the personal severity of Milton's Second Defence. The Dutch ambassador endeavoured to prevail on Cromwell to suppress the work. When he found that this was im­possible, he conveyed to Milton the letters of More, con­taining a protestation that he was not the author of the in­vective, which had given so much offence; the ambassador at the same time made it his particular request to Milton, that, in answering the book, as far as it related to the Eng­lish government, he would abstain from all hostility against More.—Milton replied, ‘that no unbecoming words should proceed from his pen;’ but his principles would not allow him to spare, at any private intercession, a public ene­my of his country. These particulars are collected from the last of our author's political treatises in Latin, the de­fence [Page 126] of himself, and they form, I trust, a favourable intro­duction to a refutation, which it is time to begin, of the severest and most plausible charge, that the recent enemies of Milton have urged against him; I mean the charge of servility and adulation, as the sycophant of an usurper.

I will state the charge in the words of his most bitter accuser, and without abridgment, that it may appear in its full force:

Let us observe, for the honour of Milton, that the para­graph, in which he is arraigned with so much rancour, con­tains a political dogma, that, if it were really true, might blast the glory of all the illustrious characters who are parti­cularly endeared to every English heart. If nothing can be [Page 127] more just than that rebellion should end in slavery, why do we revere those ancestors, who contended against kings? why do we not resign the privileges that we owe to their repeated rebellion? but the dogma is utterly unworthy of an English moralist; for assuredly we have the sanction of truth, reason, and experience, in saying, that rebellion is morally criminal or meritorious, according to the pro­vocation by which it is excited, and the end it pur­sues. This doctrine was supported even by a servant of the imperious Elizabeth. "Sir Thomas Smith" (says Milton in his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates) ‘a protestant and a statesman, in his Commonwealth of England, putting the question, whether it be lawful to rise against a tyrant, answers, that the vulgar judge of it according to the event, and the learned according to the purpose of them that do it.’ Dr. Johnson, though one of the learned, here shews not that candour which the liberal statesman had described as the characteristic of their judgment. The biographer, uttering himself political tenets of the most servile complexion, accuses Milton of servility; and, in his mode of using the words honey and hunger, falls into a petulant meanness of expression, that too clearly discovers how cordially he detested him. But perhaps this detestation was the mere effect of political prejudice, the common but unchristian abhorrence that a vehement royalist thinks it virtue to harbour and to mani­fest against a republican. We might indeed easily believe that Johnson's rancour against Milton was merely political, had he not appeared as the biographer of another illustrious republican; but when we find him representing as honour­able [Page 128] in Blake the very principles and conduct which he en­deavours to make infamous and contemptible in Milton, can we fail to observe, that he renders not the same justice to the heart of the great republican author which he had nobly rendered to the gallant admiral of the republic. To Blake he generously assigns the praise of intrepidity, honesty, contempt of wealth, and love of his country. Assuredly these virtues were as eminent in Milton—and however dif­ferent their lines in life may appear, the celebrated speech of Blake to his seamen, "It is our business to hinder foreigners from fooling us," by which he justified his continuance in his post under Cromwell, is singularly appli­cable to Milton, who, as a servant engaged by the state to conduct in Latin its foreign correspondence, might think himself as strongly bound in duty and honour as the justly applauded admiral, ‘to hinder his country from being fooled by foreigners.’ "But Milton," says his uncandid biographer, ‘continuing to exercise his office under a mani­fest usurpation, betrayed to his power that liberty which he had defended.’ Was the usurpation more manifest to Milton than to Blake? Or is it a deeper crime against liberty to write the Latin dispatches, than to fight the naval battles of a nation under the controul of an usurper? Assuredly not: nor had either Blake or Milton the least in­tention of betraying that liberty, which was equally the darling idol of their elevated and congenial spirits; but in finding the learned and eloquent biographer of these two immortal worthies so friendly to the admiral, and so ini­mical [Page 129] to the author, have we not reason to lament and reprove such inconsistent hostility.

That the Latin secretary of the nation deserved not this bitterness of censure for remaining in his office may be thought sufficiently proved by the example of Blake.—If his conduct in this article required farther justification, we might recollect with the candid bishop Newton, that the blameless Sir Matthew Hale, the favourite model of inte­grity, exercised under Cromwell the higher office of a judge; but the heaviest charge against Milton is yet un­answered, the charge of lavishing the most servile adulation on the usurper.

In replying to this most plausible accusation, let me be indulged in a few remarks, that may vindicate the credit not only of a single poet but of all Parnassus. The poe­tical fraternity have been often accused of being ever ready to flatter; but the general charge is in some measure incon­sistent with a knowledge of human nature. As poets, gene­rally speaking, have more sensibility and less prudence than other men, we should naturally expect to find them rather distinguished by abundance than by a want of sincerity; when they are candidly judged, they will generally be found so; a poet indeed is as apt to applaud a hero as a lover is to praise his mistress, and both, according to the forcible and true expression of Shakespear, ‘Are of imagination all compact.’ [Page 130] Their descriptions are more faithful to the acuteness of their own feelings than to the real qualities of the objects de­scribed. Paradoxical as it may sound, they are often defi­cient in truth, in proportion to the excess of their sincerity; the charm or the merit they celebrate is partly the phan­tom of their own fancy; but they believe it real, while they praise it as a reality; and as long as their belief is sincere, it is unjust to accuse them of adulation. Milton himself gives us an excellent touchstone for the trial of praise in the following passage of his Areopagitica; ‘there are three principal things, without which all praising is but court­ship and flattery; first, when that only is praised, which is solidly worth praise; next, when greatest likelihoods are brought that such things are truly and really in those persons to whom they are ascribed; the other, when he who praises, by shewing that such his actual persuasion is of whom he writes, can demonstrate that he flatters not.’ If we try Milton by this his own equitable law, we must ho­nourably acquit him of the illiberal charge that might al­most be thought sufficiently refuted by its apparent incon­sistency with his elevated spirit.

Though in the temperate judgment of posterity, Crom­well appears only a bold bad man, yet he dazzled and de­ceived his contemporaries with such a strong and continued blaze of real and visionary splendor, that almost all the power and all the talents on earth seemed eager to pay him unsolicited homage: but I mean not to rest the vindication of Milton on the prevalence of example, which, however high and dignified it might be, could never serve as a sanc­tion [Page 131] for the man, to whom the rare union of spotless inte­grity with consummate genius had given an elevation of character that no rank and no powers unsupported by pro­bity could possibly bestow; though all the potentates and all the literati of the world conspired to flatter the usurper, we might expect Milton to remain, like his own faithful Abdiel, ‘Unshaken, unseduc'd, unterrified.’ Assuredly he was so; and in praising Cromwell he praised a personage, whose matchless hypocrisy assumed before him a mask that the arch apostate of the poet could not wear in the presence of Abdiel, the mask of affectionate zeal towards man, and of devout attachment to God; a mask that Davenant has described with poetical felicity in the follow­ing couplet:

It was more as a faint than as an hero that Cromwell de­luded the generous credulity of Milton; and, perhaps, the recollection of his having been thus deluded inspired the poet with his admirable apology for Uriel deceived by Satan.

That sublime religious enthusiasm, which was the predo­minant characteristic of the poet, exposed him particularly to be duped by the prime artifice of the political impostor, who was indeed so consummate in the art of deception, that he occasionally deceived the prudent unheated Ludlow and the penetrating inflexible Bradshaw; nay, who carried his habitual deception to such a length, that he is supposed, by some acute judges of human nature, to have been ultimately the dupe of his own hypocritical fervour, and to have thought himself, what he induced many to think him, the selected servant of God, expressly chosen to accomplish won­ders, not only for the good of his nation, but for the true interest of Christendom.

Though Cromwell had assumed the title of Protector, when Milton in his second defence sketched a masterly por­trait of him (as we have seen he did of Bradshaw in the same production) yet the new potentate had not, at this period, completely unveiled his domineering and oppressive charac­ter; on the contrary, he affected, with the greatest art, such a tender concern for the people; he represented himself, both in his public and private protestations, so perfectly free from all ambitious desires, that many persons, who possessed not the noble unsuspecting simplicity of Milton, believed the Protector sincere in declaring, that he reluctantly submitted to the cares of government, merely for the settlement and [Page 133] security of the nation. With a mind full of fervid admi­ration for his marvellous atchievements, and generally dis­posed to give him credit for every upright intention, Milton hailed him as the father of his country, and delineated his character: if there were some particles of flattery in this panegyric, which, if we adhere to our author's just definition of flattery we cannot allow, it was completely purified from every cloud or speck of servility by the most splendid and sublime admonition that was ever given to a man possessed of great talents and great power by a genuine and dauntless friend, to whom talents and power were only objects of re­verence, when under the real or fancied direction of piety and virtue.

"^*Revere (says Milton to the Protector) the great expec­tation, the only hope, which our country now rests upon [Page 134] you—revere the sight and the sufferings of so many brave men, who, under your guidance, have fought so strenuously for freedom—revere the credit we have gained in foreign na­tions—reflect on the great things they promise themselves from our liberty, so bravely acquired; from our republic, so gloriously founded, which, should it perish like an abortion, must expose our country to the utmost contempt and dis­honour.

"Finally, revere yourself; and having sought and sustained every hardship and danger for the acquisition of this liberty, let it not be violated by yourself, or impaired by others, in the smallest degree. In truth, it is impossible for you to be free yourself unless we are so; for it is the ordi­nance of nature, that the man who first invades the liberty of others must first lose his own, and first feel himself a slave. This indeed is just. But if the very patron and tutelary angel of liberty, if he who is generally regarded as pre-emi­nent in justice, in sanctity, and virtue; if he should ulti­mately invade that liberty which he asserted himself, such invasion must indeed be pernicious and fatal, not only to himself, but to the general interest of piety and virtue. Truth, probity, and religion would then lose the estimation [Page 135] and confidence of mankind, the worst of wounds, since the fall of our first parents, that could be inflicted on the human race. You have taken upon you a burthen of weight in­expressible; it will put to the severest perpetual test the inmost qualities, virtues, and powers of your heart and soul; it will determine whether there really exists in your cha­racter that piety, faith, justice, and moderation, for the sake of which we believe you raised above others, by the in­fluence of God, to this supreme charge.

"To direct three most powerful nations by your coun­sel, to endeavour to reclaim the people from their depraved institutions to better conduct and discipline, to send forth into remotest regions your anxious spirit and incessant thoughts, to watch, to foresee, to shrink from no labour, to spurn every allurement of pleasure, to avoid the ostentation of opulence and power, these are the arduous duties, in comparison of which war itself is mere sport; these will search and prove you; they require, indeed, a man sup­ported by the assistance of heaven, and almost admonished and instructed by immediate intercourse with God. These and more I doubt not but you diligently revolve in your mind, and this in particular, by what methods you may be most able to accomplish things of highest moment, and secure to us our liberty not only safe but enlarged."

If a private individual thus speaking to a man of un­bounded influence, whom a powerful nation had idolized and courted to assume the reins of government, can be called a flatterer, we have only to wish that all the flatterers of earthly power may be of the same complexion. The ad­monition [Page 136] to the people, with which Milton concludes his second defence, is by no means inferior in dignity and spirit to the advice he bestowed on the protector. The great misfortune of the monitor was, that the two parties, to whom he addressed his eloquent and patriotic exhortation, were neither of them so worthy of his counsel as he wished them to be, and endeavoured to make them. For Crom­well, as his subsequent conduct sufficiently proved, was a political impostor with an arbitrary soul; and as to the people, they were alternately the dishonoured instruments and victims of licentiousness and fanaticism. The protector, his adherents, and his enemies, to speak of them in general, were as little able to reach the disinterested purity of Mil­ton's principles, as they were to attain, and even to estimate, the sublimity of his poetical genius. But Milton, who pas­sionately loved his country, though he saw and lamented the various corruptions of his contemporaries, still conti­nued to hope, with the native ardour of a sanguine spirit, that the mass of the English people would be enlightened and improved. His real sentiments of Cromwell, I am persuaded, were these: he long regarded him as a person not only possessed of wonderful influence and ability, but disposed to attempt, and likely to accomplish, the purest and noblest purposes of policy and religion; yet often thwarted and embarrassed in his best designs, not only by the power and machinations of the enemies with whom he had to contend, but by the want of faith, morality, and sense in the motley multitude, whom he endeavoured to guide and govern. As religious enthusiasm was the predo­minant [Page 137] characteristic of Milton, it is most probable that his fervid imagination beheld in Cromwell a person destined by heaven to reduce, if not to annihilate, what he considered as the most enormous grievance of earth, the prevalence of popery and superstition. The several humane and spirited letters which he wrote, in the name of Cromwell, to redress the injuries of the persecuted protestants, who suffered in Piedmont, were highly calculated to promote, in equal de­grees, his zeal for the purity of religion, and his attach­ment to the protector.

Yet great as the powers of Cromwell were to dazzle and delude, and willing as the liberal mind of Milton was to give credit to others for that pure public spirit, which he possessed himself, there is great reason to apprehend, that his veneration and esteem for the protector were entirely destroyed by the treacherous despotism of his latter days. But however his opinion of Oliver might change, he was far from betraying liberty, according to Johnson's ungene­rous accusation, by continuing to exercise his office; on the contrary, it ought to be esteemed a proof of his fidelity to freedom, that he condescended to remain in an office, which he had received from no individual, and in which he justly considered himself as a servant of the state. From one of his familiar letters, written in the year preceding the death of Cromwell, it is evident that he had no secret intimacy or influence with the protector; and that, instead of engaging in ambitious machinations, he confined himself as much as possible to the privacy of domestic life. Finally, on a full and fair review of all the intercourse between Milton and [Page 138] Cromwell, there is not the smallest ground to suspect, that Milton ever spoke or acted as a sycophant or a slave; he bestowed, indeed, the most liberal eulogy, both in prose and rhyme, upon the protector; but at a period when it was the general opinion, that the utmost efforts of panegyric could hardly equal the magnitude and the variety of the services rendered to his country by the acknowledged hero and the fancied patriot; at a period when the eulogist, who under­stood the frailty of human nature, and foresaw the tempta­tions of recent power, might hope that praise so magnifi­cent, united to the noblest advice, would prove to the ar­dent spirit of the protector the best preservative against the delirium of tyranny. These generous hopes were disap­pointed; the despotic proceedings of Cromwell convinced his independent monitor, that he deserved not the continued applause of a free spirit; and though the atchievements of the protector were so fascinating, that poetical panegyrics encircled even his grave, yet Milton praised him no more, but after his decease fondly hailed the revival of parlia­mentary independence, as a new dawning of God's provi­dence on the nation. In contemplating these two extraor­dinary men together, the real lover of truth and freedom can hardly fail to observe the striking contrast of their cha­racters; one was an absolute model of false, and the other of true, grandeur. Mental dignity and public virtue were in Cromwell fictitious and delusive; in Milton they were genuine and unchangeable; Cromwell shews the formidable wonders that courage and cunning can perform, with the assistance of fortune; Milton, the wonders, of a superior [Page 139] kind, that integrity and genius can accomplish, in despight of adversity and affliction.

An eager solicitude to vindicate a most noble mind from a very base and injurious imputation has led me to antici­pate some public events. From these observations on the na­tive and incorruptible independence of Milton's mind, let us return to the incidents of his domestic life.

Soon after his removal to his house in Westminster, his fourth child, Deborah, was born, on the 2d of May, 1652. The mother, according to Philips, died in child-bed. The situation of Milton at this period was such as might have depressed the mind of any ordinary man: at the age of forty-four he was left a widower, with three female orphans, the eldest about six years old, deformed in her person, and with an impediment in her speech; his own health was very deli­cate; and with eyes that were rapidly sinking into incurable blindness, he was deeply engaged in a literary contest of the highest importance. With what spirit and success he tri­umphed over his political and personal enemies the reader is already informed. When these, in 1654, were all silenced and subdued by the irresistible power of his superior talents and probity, ‘he had leisure again (says his nephew) for his own studies and private designs.’

It seems to have been the habit of Milton to devote as many hours in every day to intense study as the mental fa­culties could bear, and to render such constant exertion less oppressive to the mind, by giving variety to the objects of its application, engaging in different works of magnitude at the same time, that he might occasionally relieve and in­spirit [Page 140] his thoughts by a transition from one species of com­position to another. If we may rely on the information of Philips, he now began to employ himself in this manner on three great works; a voluminous Latin Dictionary, a history of England, and an Epic poem; of the two last I shall speak again, according to the order of their publica­tion. The first and least important, a work to which blind­ness was peculiarly unfavourable, was never brought to ma­turity, yet served to amuse this most diligent of authors, by a change of literary occupation, almost to the close of his life. His collection of words amounted to three folios; but the papers, after his decease, were so discomposed and defi­cient (to use the expression of his nephew) that the work could not be made fit for the press. They proved service­able, however, to future compilers, and were used by those who published the Latin Dictionary at Cambridge, in 1693.

Though he had no eyes to chuse a second wife, Milton did not long continue a widower. He married Catherine, the daughter of Captain Woodcock, a rigid sectarist, says Mr. Warton, of Hackney. This lady appears to have been the most tender and amiable of the poet's three wives, and she is the only one of the three whom the muse of Milton has immortalized with an affectionate memorial. Within the year of their marriage she gave birth to a daughter, and very soon followed her infant to the grave. "Her husband" (says Johnson) ‘has honoured her memory with a poor sonnet;’ an expression of contempt, which only proves that the rough critic was unable to sympathise with the [Page 141] tenderness that reigns in the pathetic poetry of Milton: in the opening of this sonnet;

and in the latter part of it,

Milton has equalled the mournful graces of Petrarch and of Camoens, who have each of them left a plaintive composi­tion on a similar idea. The curious reader, who may wish to compare the three poets on this occasion, will find the similarity I speak of in the 79th sonnet of Petrarch, and the 72d of Camoens.

The loss of a wife so beloved, and the severe inthralment of his country under the increasing despotism of Cromwell, must have wounded very deeply the tender and patriotic feelings of Milton. His variety of affliction from these sources might probably occasion his being silent, as an author, for some years. In 1655 he is supposed to have written a national manifesto in Latin, to justify the war against Spain. From that time, when his defence of him­self [Page 142] also appeared, we know not of his having been engaged in any publication till the year 1659, excepting a political manuscript of Sir Walter Raleigh, called the Cabinet Council, which he printed in 1658, with a brief advertise­ment. What his sentiments were concerning the last years of Cromwell, and the following distracted period, we have a striking proof in one of his private letters, written not long after the death of the protector. In reply to his foreign friend Oldenburg (he says) ^* "I am very far from preparing a history of our commotions, as you seem to advise, for they are more worthy of silence than of panegyric; nor do we want a person with ability to frame an history of our troubles, but to give those troubles a happy termination; for I sympathise with you in the fear, that the enemies of our liberty and our religion, who are recently combined, may find us too much exposed to their attack in these our civil dissentions, or rather our fits of frenzy; they cannot, how­ever, wound our religion more than we have done ourselves by our own enormities." The interest of religion appears on every occasion to have maintained its due ascendency in the mind of Milton, and to have formed, through the whole course of his life, the primary object of his pursuit; it led him to publish, in 1659, two distinct treatises, the first on civil power in ecclesiastical causes; the second, [Page 143] on the likeliest means to remove hirelings out of the church; performances which Johnson presumes to charac­terize by an expression; not very consonant to the spirit of Christianity, representing them as written merely to gratify the author's malevolence to the clergy; a coarse reproach, which every bigot bestows upon enlightened solicitude for the purity of religion, and particularly uncandid in the present case, because the devout author has conscientiously explained his own motives in the following expressions, addressed to the long parliament restored after the decease of Cromwell.

"Of civil liberty I have written heretofore by the ap­pointment, and not without the approbation, of civil power; of Christian liberty I write now, which others long since having done with all freedom under heathen emperors, I should do wrong to suspect that I now shall with less under Christian governors, and such especially as profess openly their defence of Christian liberty; although I write this not otherways appointed or induced than by an inward persuasion of the Christian duty, which I may usefully dis­charge herein to the common Lord and Master of us all, and the certain hope of his approbation, first and chiefest to be sought." Milton was not a being of that common and reptile class, who assume an affected devotion as the mask of malignity. In addressing his second treatise also to the Par­liament, he describes himself as a man under the protection of the legislative assembly, who had used, during eighteen years, on all occasions to assert the just rights and freedom both of church and state.

[Page 144]Had he been conscious of any base servility to Cromwell, he would certainly have abstained from this manly assertion of his own patriotic integrity, which, in that case, would have been only ridiculous and contemptible. His opinions might be erroneous, and his ardent mind over heated; but no man ever maintained, with more steadiness and resolu­tion, the native dignity of an elevated spirit, no man more sedulously endeavoured to discharge his duty both to earth and heaven.

In February 1659, he published The ready and easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, a work not ap­proved even by republican writers: I will only make one observation upon it: the motto to this performance seems to display the just opinion that Milton entertained concern­ing the tyranny of Cromwell;

a very happy allusion to the noble but neglected advice which he bestowed on the Protector.

Amidst the various political distractions towards the end of the year 1659, he addressed a letter to a nameless friend, who had conversed with him the preceding evening on the dangerous ruptures of the commonwealth. This letter and a brief paper, containing a sketch of a commonwealth, addressed to general Monk, were, soon after the author's [Page 145] death communicated by his nephew to Toland, who im­parted them to the public.

Milton gave yet another proof of his unwearied attention to public affairs, by publishing brief notes on a sermon preached by Dr. Griffith, at Mercer's Chapel, March 25th, 1660, ‘wherein (says the annotator) many notorious wrestings of scripture, and other falsities, are observed.’

When the repeated protestations of Monk to support the republic had ended in his introduction of the king, the anxious friends of Milton, who thought the literary cham­pion of the parliament might be exposed to revenge from the triumphant royalists, hurried him into concealment. The solicitude of those who watched over his safety was so great, that, it is said, they deceived his enemies by a report of his death, and effectually prevented a search for his person (during the first tumultuary and vindictive rage of the royalists) by a pretended funeral. A few weeks be­fore the restoration (probably in April) he quitted his house in Westminster, and did not appear in public again till after the act of oblivion, which passed on the 29th of August. In this important interval some events occurred, which greatly affected both his security and reputation. The House of Commons, on the 16th of June, manifested their resentment against his person as well as his writ­ings, by ordering the attorney general to commence a pro­secution against him, and petitioning the king, that his two books, the Defence of the People, and his Answer to Eikon Basilike, might be publicly burnt.

[Page 146]Happily for the honour of England, the person of the great author was more fortunate than his writings in escaping from the fury of persecution. Within three days after the burning of his books, he found himself relieved from the necessity of concealment, and sheltered under the common protection of the law by the general act of indemnity, which had not included his name in the list of exceptions. It has been thought wonderful by many, that a writer, whose ce­lebrated compositions had rendered him an object of abhor­rence to the royal party, could elude the activity of their triumphant revenge, and various conjectures have been started to account for the safety of Milton, after his enemies had too plainly discovered an inclination to crush him. One of these conjectural causes of his escape represents two con­temporary poets in so amiable a light, that though I am un­able to confirm the anecdote entirely by any new evidence, I shall yet dwell upon it with pleasure. Richardson, whose affectionate veneration for the genius and virtue he cele­brates makes ample amends for all the quaintness of his style, has the following passage on the subject in question:

‘Perplexed and inquisitive as I was, I at length found the secret, which he from whom I had it thought he had communicated to me long ago, and wondered he had not. I will no longer keep you in expectation:—'twas Sir William Davenant obtained his remission, in return for his own life procured by Milton's interest, when himself was under condemnation, anno 1650—a life was owing to Milton (Davenant's) and 'twas paid nobly; Milton's for Davenant's, at Davenant's intercession.—It [Page 147] will now be expected I should declare what authority I have for this story;—my first answer is, Mr. Pope told it me. Whence had he it? From Mr. Betterton—Sir William was his patron—Betterton was prentice to a bookseller, John Holden, the same who printed Dave­nant's Gondibert. There Sir William saw him, and, persuading his master to part with him, brought him first on the stage. Betterton then may be well allowed to know this transaction from the fountain head.’

On this interesting anecdote Johnson makes the follow­ing remark: ‘Here is a reciprocation of generosity and gratitude so pleasing, that the tale makes its own way to credit, but if help were wanted I know not where to find it; the danger of Davenant is certain from his own relation, but of his escape there is no account.’

This passage of the critical biographer affords a singular proof, that he is sometimes as inaccurate in narration as he is defective in sentiment. Impressed as I am with the clearest conviction of his repeated endeavours to depreciate the character of Milton, I will not suppose that Johnson could designedly suppress an evidence of the poet's genero­sity, which, while he is speaking of it in terms of admira­tion, he still endeavours to render problematical; yet cer­tain it is, that of Milton's protection of Davenant a very obvious evidence exists in Antony Wood, who says, under the article Davenant, ‘he was carried prisoner to the Isle of Wight, anno 1650, and afterwards to the Tower of London, in order to be tried for his life in the High Court of Justice, anno 1651; but upon the mediation of John [Page 148] Milton and others, especially two godly aldermen of York (to whom he had shewn great civility when they had been taken prisoners in the north by some of the forces under William Marquis of Newcastle) he was saved, and had liberty allowed him as a prisoner at large.’

Thus far the pleasing story is sufficiently proved to the honour of Milton. That Davenant endeavoured to return the favour is highly probable, from the amiable tenderness and benevolent activity of his character. Perhaps this pro­bability may seem a little strengthened by the following verses of Davenant, in a poem addressed to the king on his happy return:

If Davenant was in any degree instrumental to the secu­rity of Milton, it is probable that he served him rather from gratitude than affection, as no two writers of the time were more different from each other in their religious and poli­tical opinions. That the poet-laureat of Charles was ut­terly unconscious of those inestimable poetic powers, which the blind secretary of the republic was providentially re­served to display, we may infer from a very remarkable couplet, towards the close of a second poem, addressed by [Page 149] Davenant to the King, where, speaking of Homer, he ven­tures to assert that

It is however very possible that Davenant might doubly conduce [...] the production of Paradise Lost; first, as one of those who excited their influence to secure the author from molestation; and secondly, as affording by his Gondibert an incentive to the genius of Milton to shew how infinitely he could surpass a poem which Hobbs (whose opinions he despised) had extravagantly extolled as the most exquisite production of the epic muse. In Aubrey's manuscript anecdotes of Milton it is said, that he began his Paradise Lost about two years before the return of the king, and finished it about three years after that event; the account appears the more probable, as the following lines in the commencement of the seventh book pathetically allude to his present situation:

How peculiarly affecting are these beautiful verses, when the history of the poet suggests that he probably wrote them while he was concealed in an obscure corner of the city, that resounded with the triumphant roar of his in­toxicated enemies, among whom drunkenness arose to such extravagance, that even the festive royalists found it neces­sary to issue a proclamation, which forbade the drinking of healths. How poignant at this time must have been the personal and patriotic feelings of Milton, who had passed his life in animating himself and his country to habits of temperance, truth, and public virtue, yet had the mortifi­cation or finding that country, so dear to him, now doubly disgraced; first, by the hypocrisy and treacherous ambition of republicans, to whose pretended virtues he had given too easy credit; and now, by the mean licentious servility of roy­alists, whose more open though not more dangerous vices his upright and high-toned spirit had ever held in abhor­rence. For his country he had every thing to apprehend from the blind infatuation with which the parliament had rejected the patriotic suggestion of Hale (afterwards the il­lustrious chief justice) to establish constitutional limitations [Page 151] to the power of the king at the critical period of his re­ception. The neglect of this measure contributed not a little to subsequent evils, and the reign of Charles the S [...] ­cond was in truth deformed with all the public misery and disgrace which Milton had predicted, when he argued on the idea of his re-admission. For his own person, the lite­rary champion of the people had no less to dread from the barbarity of public vengeance, or from the private dagger of some overheated royalist, who, like the assassins of Doris­laus in Holland, and of Ascham in Spain, might think it meritorious to seize any opportunity of destroying a servant of the English republic. When royal government, restored to itself, could yet descend to authorise a mean and exe­crable indignity against the dead body of a man so magna­nimous and so innocent as Blake, it was surely natural, and by no means unbecoming the spirit of Milton, to speak as he does, in the preceding verses, of evil days and evil tongues, of darkness and of danger.

‘This darkness (says Johnson) had his eyes been better employed, had undoubtedly deserved compassion.’ What! had Milton no title to compassion for his personal calamity, because he had nobly sacrificed his sight to what he esteemed an important discharge of his public duty?—Oh egregi­ous morality! to which no feeling heart can subscribe. No, say his implacable enemies, he lost his eyes in the vin­dication of wickedness: but admitting their assertion in its full force, justice and humanity still contend, that, instead of diminishing, it rather doubles his claim to compassion; to suffer in a spirited defence of guilt, that we mistake and [Page 152] esteem as virtue, is, perhaps, of all pitiable misfortunes, what a candid and considerate mind should be most willing to pity.

But Johnson proceeds to say, ‘of evil tongues for Mil­ton to complain required impudence at least equal to his other powers; Milton, whose warmest advocates must allow, that he never spared any asperity of reproach or brutality of insolence.’

These are, perhaps, the most bitter words that were ever applied by an author, illustrious himself for great talents, and still more for christian virtue, to a character pre-emi­nent in genius and in piety. By shewing to what a mar­vellous degree a very cultivated and devout mind may be exasperated by party rage, may they serve to caution every fervid spirit against that outrageous animosity, which a difference of sentiment in politics and religion is so apt to produce. It would seem almost an affront to the memory of Milton to vindicate him elaborately from a charge, whose very words exhibit so palpable a violation of decency and truth.

His coldest advocates, instead of allowing that he never spared any brutality of insolence, may rather contend, that his native tenderness of heart, and very graceful education, rendered it hardly possible for him at any time to be inso­lent and brutal. It would have been wonderful indeed, had he not written with some degree of asperity, when his antagonist Salmasius asserted, that he ought to suffer an ignominious and excruciating death. Against the unfortu­nate (but not innocent) Charles the First, he expressly de­clares, [Page 153] that he published nothing till after his decease; and that he meant not, as he says in one of his Latin works, to insult the Manes of the king, is indeed evident to an un­prejudiced reader, from the following very beautiful and pathetic sentence, with which he begins his answer to the Eikon Basilike:

"To descant on the misfortunes of a person fallen from so high a dignity, who hath also paid his final debt, both to nature and his faults, is neither of itself a thing commend­able, nor the intention of this discourse." Those who fairly consider the exasperated state of the contending par­ties, when Milton wrote, and compare his political compo­sitions with the savage ribaldry of his opponents, however mistaken they may think him in his ideas of government, will yet find more reason to admire his temper than to con­demn his asperity.

If in a quiet study, at a very advanced period of life, and at the distance of more than a century from the days of the republic; if a philosopher so situated could be hurried by political heat to speak of Milton with such harsh intem­perance of language, though writing under the friendly ti­tle of his biographer, with what indulgence ought we to view that asperity in Milton himself, which arose from the immediate pressure of public oppression and of private out­rage; for his spirit had been enflamed, not only by the sight of many national vexations, but by seeing his own moral character attacked with the most indecent and execrable calumny that can incite the indignation of insulted virtue. If the fascinating powers of his sacred poem, and the lustre [Page 154] of his integrity, have failed to soften the virulence of an aged moralist against him in our days, what must he not have had to apprehend from the raging passions of his own time, when his poetical genius had not appeared in its meridian splendor, and when most of his writings were considered as recent crimes against those, who were entering on their ca­reer of triumph and revenge? Johnson, indeed, asserts in his barbarous censure of Milton's exquisite picture of his own situation, that the poet, in speaking of his danger, was ungrateful and unjust; that the charge itself seems to be false, for it would be hard to recollect any reproach cast upon him, either serious or ludicrous, through the whole re­maining part of his life; yet Lauder, once the associate of Johnson in writing against Milton, expressly affirms, that it was warmly debated for three days, whether he should suffer death with the regicides or not, as many contended that his guilt was superior to theirs. Lauder, indeed, mentions no authority for his assertion; and the word of a man so su­premely infamous would deserve no notice, were not the circumstance rendered probable by the rancour and atrocity of party spirit. To what detestable excesses this spirit could proceed we have not only an example in Lauder himself (of whose malignity to the poet I shall have subsequent occasion to speak) but in that collection of virulent invec­tives against Milton, composed chiefly by his contempora­ries, which Lauder added as an appendix to his own most malignant pamphlet. The most singular and indecent of these invectives, whose scurrility is too gross to be transcribed, has been imputed to that very copious writer, Sir Roger [Page 155] L'Estrange; and if a pen employed so savagely against Milton could obtain public encouragement and applause, he might surely, without affectation or timidity, think him­self exposed to the dagger of some equally hostile and more sanguinary royalist. L'Estrange, for such sufferings in the cause of royalty as really entitled him to reward, obtained, not long after the restoration, the revived but unconstitu­tional office of licenser to the press. It was happy for li­terature that he possessed not that oppressive jurisdiction when the author of the Paradise Lost was obliged to solicit an imprimatur, since the excess of his malevolence to Milton might have then exerted itself in such a manner as to entitle both the office and its possessor to the execration of the world. The licenser of that period, Thomas Tomkyns, chaplain to archbishop Sheldon, though hardly so full of rancour as L'Estrange (if L'Estrange was the real author of the ribaldry ascribed to him) was absurd or malignant enough to obstruct, in some measure, the publication of Pa­radise Lost. "He, among other frivolous exceptions (says Toland) would needs suppress the whole poem, for imagi­nary treason in the following lines:

[Page 156]By what means the poet was happily enabled to triumph over the malevolence of an enemy in office we are not in­formed by the author, who has recorded this very interesting anecdote; but from the peril to which his immortal work was exposed, and which the mention of a licenser to the press has led me to anticipate, let us return to his personal danger: the extent of this danger, and the particulars of his escape, have never been completely discovered. The account that his nephew gives of him at this momentous period is chiefly contained in the following sentence:

"It was a friend's house in Bartholomew Close where he lived till the act of oblivion came forth, which, it pleased God, proved as favourable to him as could be hoped or ex­pected, through the intercession of some that stood his friends both in council and parliament; particularly in the House of Commons, Mr. Andrew Marvel, a member for Hull, acted vigorously in his behalf, and made a considerable party for him."

Marvel, like the superior author whom he so nobly pro­tected, was himself a poet and a patriot. He had been asso­ciated with Milton in the office of Latin secretary in 1657, and cultivated his friendship by a tender and respectful at­tachment. As he probably owed to that friendship the im­provement of his own talents and virtues, it is highly pleasing to find, that he exerted them on different occasions in establishing the security, and in celebrating the genius of his incomparable friend. His efforts of regard on the present emergency are liberally described in the preceding expression of Philips; and his friendly verses on the publi­cation [Page 157] of the Paradise Lost deserve no common applause; for the records of literature hardly exhibit a more just, a more spirited, or a more generous compliment paid by one poet to another.

But the friendship of Marvel, vigilant, active, and bene­ficial as it was, could not secure Milton from being seized and hurried into confinement. It appears from the minutes of the House of Commons, that he was prisoner to their serjeant on the 15th of December. The particulars of his imprisonment are involved in darkness; but Dr. Birch (whose copious life of Milton is equally full of intelligence and candour) conjectures, with great probability, that on his appearing in public after the act of indemnity, and ad­journment of Parliament, on the 13th of September, he was seized in consequence of the order formerly given by the Commons for his prosecution.

The exact time of his continuing in custody no researches have ascertained. The records of Parliament only prove, that on the 15th of December the House ordered his re­lease; but the same upright and undaunted spirit, which had made Milton in his younger days a resolute opposer of injustice and oppression, still continued a characteristic of his declining life, and now induced him, disadvanta­geously situated as he was for such a contest, to resist the rapacity of the parliamentary officer, who endeavoured to extort from him an exorbitant see on his discharge. He remonstrated to the house on the iniquity of their servant; and as the affair was referred to the committee of privileges, [Page 158] he probably obtained the redress that he had the courage to demand.

In this fortunate escape from the grasp of triumphant and vindictive power, Milton may be considered as terminating his political life: commencing from his return to the con­tinent, it had extended to a period of twenty years; in three of these he had been afflicted with partial but in­creasing blindness, and in six he had been utterly blind. His exertions in this period of his life had exposed him to infinite obloquy, but his generous and enlightened country, whatever may be the state of her political opinions, will remember, with becoming equity and pride, that the sub­limest of her poets, though deceived as he certainly was by extraordinary pretenders to public virtue, and subject to great illusion in his ideas of government, is entitled to the first of encomiums, the praise of being truly an honest man: since it was assuredly his constant aim to be the steady disinterested adherent and encomiast of truth and justice; hence we find him continually displaying those internal blessings, which have been happily called, "the clear wit­nesses of a benign nature," an innocent conscience, and a satisfied understanding.

Such is the imperfection of human existence, that mis­taken notions and principles are perfectly compatible with elevation, integrity, and satisfaction of mind. The writer must be a slave of prejudice, or a sycophant to power, who would represent Milton as deficient in any of these noble endowments. Even Addison seems to lose his rare Chris­tian candour, and Hume his philosophical precision, when [Page 159] these two celebrated though very different authors speak harshly of Milton's political character, without paying due acknowledgment to the rectitude of his heart. I trust, the probity of a very ardent but uncorrupted enthusiast is in some measure vindicated in the course of these pages, happy if they promote the completion of his own manly wish to be perfectly known, if they impress a just and can­did estimate of his merits and mistakes on the temperate mind of his country.

PART III.

IN beginning to contemplate the latter years of Milton, it may be useful to remark, that they afford, perhaps, the most animating lesson, which biography, instructive as it is, can supply; they shew to what noble use a cultivated and religious mind may convert even declining life, though embittered by a variety of afflictions, and darkened by per­sonal calamity.

On regaining his liberty, he took a house in Holborn, near Red Lion Fields, but soon removed to Jewin-street, and there married, in his 54th year, his third wife, Eliza­beth Minshall, the daughter of a gentleman in Cheshire. As the misfortune of blindness seems particularly to require a female companion, and yet almost precludes the unhappy sufferer from selecting such as might suit him, Milton is said to have formed this attachment on the recommendation of his friend Dr. Paget, an eminent physician of the city, to whom the lady was related. Some biographers have spoken harshly of her temper and conduct; but let me ob­serve, in justice to her memory, that the manuscript of Aubrey, to whom she was probably known, mentions her as a gentle person, of a peaceful and agreeable humour. [Page 161] That she was particularly attentive to her husband, and treated his infirmities with tenderness, is candidly remarked by Mr. Warton, in a posthumous note to the testamentary papers relating to Milton, which his indefatigable researches at length discovered, and committed to the press, a few months before his own various and valuable labours were termi­nated by death. These very curious and interesting pa­pers afford information respecting the latter days of the poet, which his late biographers were so far from possessing, that they could not believe it existed. Indeed, Mr. Warton himself had concluded, that all farther enquiries for the will must be fruitless, as he had failed in a tedious and intricate search. At last, however, he was enabled, by the friendship of Sir William Scott, to rescue from oblivion a curiosity so precious to poetical antiquarians. He found in the prero­gative register the will of Milton, which, though made by his brother Christopher, a lawyer by profession, was set aside from a deficiency in point of form—the litigation of this will produced a collection of evidence relating to the testator, which renders the discovery of those long forgotten papers peculiarly interesting; they shew very forcibly, and in new points of view, his domestic infelicity, and his amia­able disposition. The tender and sublime poet, whose sen­sibility and sufferings were so great, appears to have been almost as unfortunate in his daughters as the Lear of Shake­speare. A servant declares in evidence, that her deceased master, a little before his last marriage, had lamented to her the ingratitude and cruelty of his children. He complained, [Page 162] that they combined to defraud him in the oeconomy of his house, and sold several of his books in the basest manner. His feelings on such an outrage, both as a parent and as a scholar, must have been singularly painful; perhaps they suggested to him those very pathetic lines, where he seems to paint himself, in Sampson Agonistes:

Unfortunate as he had proved in matrimony, he was pro­bably induced to venture once more into that state by the bitter want of a domestic protector against his inhuman daughters, under which description I include only the two eldest; and in palliation even of their conduct, detestable as it appears, we may observe, that they are entitled to pity, as having been educated without the inestimable guidance of maternal tenderness, under a father afflicted with loss of sight; they were also young: at the time of Milton's last marriage his eldest daughter had only reached the age of fifteen, and Deborah, his favourite, was still a child of nine years.

His new connection seems to have afforded him what he particularly sought; that degree of domestic tranquillity and comfort essential to his perseverance in study, which appears to have been, through all the vicissitudes of fortune, [Page 163] the prime object of his life; and while all his labours were under the direction of religion or of philanthropy, there was nothing too arduous or too humble for his mind. In 1661 he published a little work, entitled, "Accidence commenced Grammar," benevolently calculated for the relief of children, by shortening their very tedious and irksome progress in learning the elements of Latin. He published also, in the same year, another brief composition of Sir Walter Raleigh's, containing (like the former work of that celebrated man, which the same editor had given to the public) a series of political maxims; one of these I am tempted to transcribe, by a persuasion that Milton regarded it with peculiar pleasure, from its tendency to justify the parliamentary contention with Charles the First. Had the misguided monarch observed the maxim of Raleigh, he would not, like that illustrious victim to the vices of his royal father, have perished on the scaffold.—The maxim is the seventeenth of the collection, and gives the follow­ing instruction to a prince for preserving an hereditary kingdom.

"To be moderate in his taxes and impositions, and, when need doth require to use the subjects purse, to do it by parliament, and with their consent, making the cause apparent to them, and shewing his unwillingness in charg­ing them. Finally, so to use it, that it may seem rather an offer from his subjects, than an exaction by him."

However vehement the enmity of various persons against Milton might have been, during the tumult of passions on the recent restoration, there is great reason to believe, that [Page 164] his extraordinary abilities and probity so far triumphed over the prejudices against him, that, with all his republican of­fences upon his head, he might have been admitted to royal favour had he been willing to accept it. Richardson re­lates, on very good authority, that the post of Latin secre­tary, in which he had obtained so much credit as a scho­lar, was again offered to him after the Restoration; that he rejected it, and replied to his wife, who advised his ac­ceptance of the appointment, "You, as other women, would ride in your coach; for me, my aim is to live and die an honest man." Johnson discovers an inclination to discredit this story, because it does honour to Milton, and seemed inconsistent with his own ideas of probability. "He that had shared authority, either with the Parliament or Cromwell," says Johnson, "might have forborne to talk very loudly of his honesty." How miserably narrow is the prejudice, that cannot allow perfect honesty to many indivi­duals on both sides in a contest like that, which divided the nation in the civil wars. Undoubtedly there were men in each party, and men of great mental endowments, who acted, during that calamitous contention, according to the genuine dictates of conscience. Those who examine the conduct of Milton with impartiality will be ready to allow, that he possessed not only one of the most cultivated, but one of the most upright minds, which the records of human nature have taught us to revere. His retaining his employ­ment under Cromwell has, I trust, been so far justified, that it can no more be represented as a blemish on his integrity. His office, indeed, was of such a nature, that he might, with­out [Page 165] a breach of honesty, have resumed it under the king; but his return to it, though not absolutely dishonourable, would have ill accorded with that refined purity and eleva­tion of character, which, from his earliest youth, it was the noblest ambition of Milton to acquire and support. He would have lost much of his title to the reverence of man­kind for his magnanimity, had he accepted his former office under Charles the Second, whom he must have particularly despised as a profligate and servile tyrant, as ready to betray the honour of the nation as he was careless of his own; a personage whom Milton could never have beheld without hor­ror, on reflecting on his singular barbarity to his celebrated friend, that eccentric but interesting character, Sir Henry Vane. The king, so extolled for his mercy, had granted the life of Sir Henry to the joint petition of the Lords and Commons; but, after promising to preserve him, signed a warrant for his execution—one of the most inhuman and detestable acts of duplicity that was ever practised against a subject by his sovereign. It is to the fate of Vane, with others of that party, and to his own personal sufferings, that the great poet alludes in the following admirable re­flections, assigned to the chorus in his Sampson Agonistes:

Warburton was the first, I believe, to remark how exactly these concluding lines describe the situation of the poet himself, afflicted by his loss of property, and "his gout, not caused by intemperance." The same acute but very unequal critic is by no means so happy in his observa­tion, that Milton seems to have chosen the subject of this sublime drama for the sake of the satire on bad wives; 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 [Page 166] [...] [Page 167] [...] [Page 168] 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. 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 Sampson Agonistes is the most singularly affecting composition, that was ever produced by sensibility of heart and vigour of ima­gination. To give it this peculiar 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 public admiration; lastly, he had fallen from that heighth of unrivalled glory, and had experienced the most humili­ating reverse of fortune: ‘His foes' derision, captive, poor, and blind.’

In delineating the greater part of Sampson'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.

And if, in reading the Sampson Agonistes, we observe how many passages, expressed with the most energetic sensibility, [Page 169] 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 pathetic 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.

The concluding verses of the beautiful chorus (which I have already cited in part) appear to me particularly affect­ing, from the persuasion that Milton, in composing them, addressed the two last immediately to Heaven, as a prayer for himself:

If the conjecture of this application be just, we may add, that never was the prevalence of a righteous prayer more happily conspicuous; and let me here remark, that how­ever various the opinions of men may be concerning the [Page 170] merits or demerits of Milton's political character, the inte­grity of his heart appears to have secured to him the favour of Providence; since it pleased the Giver of all good not only to turn his labours to a peaceful end, but to irradiate his declining life with the most abundant portion of those pure and sublime mental powers, for which he had con­stantly and fervently prayed, as the choicest bounty of Heaven.

At this period, his kind friend and physician, who had proved so serviceable to him in the recommendation of an attentive and affectionate wife, introduced to his notice a young reader of Latin, in that singular character, Thomas Ellwood, the quaker, who has written a minute history of his own life; a book, which suggests the reflection, how strangely a writer may sometimes mistake his way in his endeavours to engage the attention of posterity. Had the honest quaker bequeathed to the world as circumstantial an account of his great literary friend, as he has done of himself, his book would certainly have engrossed no com­mon share of public regard: we are indebted to him, how­ever, for his incidental mention of the great poet; and as there is a pleasing air of simplicity and truth in his narrative, I shall gratify the reader by inserting it with very little abridgment:

"JOHN MILTON, a gentleman of great note for learning throughout the learned world, having filled a public station in former times, lived now a private and retired life in Lon­don; and having wholly lost his sight, kept always a man [Page 171] to read to him, which usually was the son of some gentle­man of his acquaintance, whom in kindness he took to im­prove in his learning.

"By the mediation of my friend, Isaac Penington, with Dr. Paget, and of Dr. Paget with John Milton, was I ad­mitted to come to him, not as a servant to him, which at that time he needed not, nor to be in the house with him, but only to have the liberty of coming to his house at cer­tain hours, when I would, and to read to him what books he should appoint me, which was all the favour I desired."

Ellwood was at this time an ingenuous but undisciplined young man, about three-and-twenty;—his father, a justice of Oxfordshire, had taken him, very unseasonably, from school, with a view to lessen his own expences, and this his younger son, after wasting some years at home, attached him­self, with great fervency, to the sect of quakers. His reli­gious ardour involved him in a long and painful quarrel with his father, and in many singular adventures—he united with his pious zeal a lively regard for literature; and being grieved to find that his interrupted education had permitted him to acquire but a slender portion of classical learning, he anxiously sought the acquaintance of Milton, in the hope of improving it.

"I went, therefore (says the candid quaker) and took myself a lodging near to his house, which was then in Jewin-street, as conveniently as I could, and from thence forward went every day in the afternoon, except on the first days of the week, and sitting by him in his dining-room, read to [Page 172] him such books in the Latin tongue as he pleased to hear me read.

"At my first sitting to read to him, observing that I used the English pronunciation, he told me, if I would have the benefit of the Latin tongue, not only to read and under­stand Latin authors, but to converse with foreigners, either abroad or at home, I must learn the foreign pronunciation; to this I consenting, he instructed me how to sound the vowels: this change of pronunciation proved a new diffi­culty to me; but,

And so did I; which made my reading the more accept­able to my master. He, on the other hand, perceiving with what earnest desire I pursued learning, gave me not only all the encouragement, but all the help he could; for having a curious ear, he understood by my tone when I understood what I read, and when I did not, and accordingly would stop me, examine me, and open the most difficult passages to me."

The clearness and simplicity of Ellwood's narrative brings us, as it were, into the company of Milton, and shews, in a very agreeable point of view, the native courtesy and sweetness of a temper, that has been strangely misrepresented as morose and austere.

Johnson, with his accustomed asperity to Milton, disco­vers an inclination to censure him for his mode of teaching [Page 173] Latin to Ellwood; but Milton, who was instructing an in­digent young man, had probably very friendly reasons for wishing him to acquire immediately the foreign pronuncia­tion; and assuredly the patience, good nature, and success, with which he condescended to teach this singular attendant, do credit both to the disciple and the preceptor.

Declining health soon interrupted the studies of Ellwood, and obliged him to retire to the house of a friend and phy­sician in the country. Here, after great suffering from sick­ness, he revived, and returned again to London.

"I was very kindly received by my Master (continues the interesting quaker) who had conceived so good an opinion of me, that my conversation, I found, was acceptable, and he seemed heartily glad of my recovery and return, and into our old method of study we fell again, I reading to him, and he explaining to me, as occasion required."

But learning (as poor Ellwood observes) was almost a forbidden fruit to him. His intercourse with Milton was again interrupted by a second calamity; a party of soldiers rushed into a meeting of quakers, that included this unfor­tunate scholar, and he was hurried, with his friends, from prison to prison. Though ten-pence was all the money he possessed, his honest pride prevented his applying to Milton for relief in this exigence, and he contrived to support him­self by his industry, in confinement, with admirable forti­tude.

Moderate prosperity, however, visited at last this honest and devout man, affording him an agreeable opportunity [Page 174] of being useful to the great poet, who had deigned to be his preceptor.

An affluent quaker, who resided at Chalfont, in Bucking­hamshire, settled Ellwood in his family, to instruct his children, and in 1665, when the pestilence raged in Lon­don, Milton requested his friendly disciple to find a refuge for him in his neighbourhood.

"I took a pretty box for him," says this affectionate friend, "in Giles Chalfont, a mile from me, of which I gave him notice, and intended to have waited on him, and seen him well settled in it, but was prevented by imprisonment."

This was a second captivity that the unfortunate young man had to sustain; for in consequence of a recent and most iniquitous persecution of the quakers, he was appre­hended at the funeral of a friend, and confined in the gaol of Aylesbury.

"But being now released," continues Elwood, "I soon made a visit to him, to welcome him into the country.

After some common discourses had passed between us, he called for a manuscript of his, which, being brought, he delivered to me, bidding me take it home with me, and read it at my leisure, and when I had so done, return it to him, with my judgment thereupon.

"When I came home, and set myself to read it, I found it was that excellent poem, which he entitled Paradise Lost.

"After I had, with the best attention, read it through, I made him another visit, and returned him his book, with due acknowledgment of the favour he had done me in communicating it to me. He asked me how I liked it, and [Page 175] what I thought of it? which I modestly and freely told him; and, after some farther discourse about it, I pleasantly said to him, 'Thou hast said much here of Paradise lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise found.' He made me no answer, but sat some time in a muse, then brake off that discourse, and fell upon another subject.

"After the sickness was over, and the city well cleansed, and become safely habitable again, he returned thither; and when afterwards I went to wait on him there (which I sel­dom failed of doing, whenever my occasions led me to London) he shewed me his second poem, called Paradise Regain'd, and in a pleasant tone said to me, 'This is owing to you, for you put it into my head by the question you put to me at Chalfont, which before I had not thought of'."

The personal regard of this ingenuous quaker for Milton, and his giving birth to a composition of such magnitude and merit as Paradise Regain'd, entitle him to distinction in a life of his great poetical friend, and I have therefore rather transcribed than abridged his relation. My reader, I doubt not, will join with me in wishing that we had more sketches of the venerable bard, thus minutely delineated from the life, in the colours of fidelity and affection.

The last of Milton's familiar letters in Latin relates to this period; it speaks with devotional gratitude of the safe asylum from the plague, which he had found in the country; it speaks also with so much feeling of his past political adven­tures, and of the present inconvenience which he suffered from the loss of sight, that I apprehend an entire translation of it [Page 176] can hardly fail of being acceptable to the English reader. It is dated from London, August 15, 1666, and addressed to Heimbach, an accomplished German, who is stiled coun­sellor to the elector of Brandenburgh. An expression in a former letter to the same correspondent seems to intimate, that this learned foreigner, who visited England in his youth, had resided with Milton, perhaps in the character of a dis­ciple—But here is the interesting letter:

^*"If among so many funerals of my countrymen, in a year so full of pestilence and sorrow, you were induced, as you say, by rumour to believe that I also was snatched away, it is not surprising; and if such a rumour prevailed among those of your nation, as it seems to have done, because they were solicitous for my health, it is not unpleasing, for I must esteem it as a proof of their benevolence towards me. But [Page 177] by the graciousness of God, who had prepared for me a safe retreat in the country, I am still alive and well; and I trust not utterly an unprofitable servant, whatever duty in life there yet remains for me to fulfil. That you remember me, after so long an interval in our correspondence, gratifies me exceedingly, though, by the politeness of your expression, you seem to afford me room to suspect, that you have rather forgotten me, since, as you say, you admire in me so many different virtues wedded together. From so many weddings I should assuredly dread a family too numerous, were it not certain that, in narrow circumstances and under severity of fortune, virtues are most excellently reared, and are most flourishing. Yet one of these said virtues has not very handsomely rewarded me for entertaining her; for that which you call my political virtue, and which I should ra­ther wish you to call my devotion to my country (enchant­ing me with her captivating name) almost, if I may say so, expatriated me. Other virtues, however, join their voices to assure me, that wherever we prosper in rectitude there is our country. In ending my letter, let me obtain from you this favour, that if you find any parts of it incorrectly written, and without stops, you will impute it to the boy who writes for me, who is utterly ignorant of Latin, and to whom I am forced (wretchedly enough) to repeat every single sylla­ble that I dictate. I still rejoice that your merit as an ac­complished man, whom I knew as a youth of the highest expectation, has advanced you so far in the honourable fa­vour of your prince. For your prosperity in every other point you have both my wishes and my hopes. Farewell.

"London, August 15, 1666."

[Page 178]How interesting is this complaint, when we recollect that the great writer, reduced to such irksome difficulties in regard to his secretary, was probably engaged at this period in polishing the sublimest of poems.

From Ellwood's account it appears, that Paradise Lost was complete in 1665. Philips and Toland assert, that it was actually published the following year; but I believe no copy has been found of a date so early. The first edition on the list of the very accurate Mr. Loft was printed by Peter Parker in 1667, and, probably, at the expence of the author, who sold the work to Samuel Simmons, by a con­tract dated the 27th of April, in the same year.

The terms of this contract are such as a lover of genius can hardly hear without a sigh of pity and indignation. The author of the Paradise Lost received only an immediate payment of five pounds for a work, which is the very master-piece of sublime and refined imagination; a faculty not only naturally rare, but requiring an extraordinary co­incidence of circumstances to cherish and strengthen it for the long and regular exercise essential to the production of such a poem. The bookseller's agreement, however, enti­tled the author to a conditional payment of fifteen pounds more; five to be paid after the sale of thirteen hundred copies of the first edition, and five, in the same manner, both on a second and a third. The number of each edition was limited to fifteen hundred copies.

The original size of the publication was a small quarto, and the poem was at first divided into ten books; but in the second edition the author very judiciously increased the [Page 179] number to twelve, by introducing a pause in the long nar­ration of the seventh and of the tenth, so that each of these books became two.

Simmons was a printer, and his brief advertisement to the work he had purchased is curious enough to merit in­sertion:

"Courteous Reader, there was no argument at first in­tended to the book; but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it, I have procured it, and withal a reason of that, which stumbled many others, why the poem rhymes not." Here we may plainly see that the novelty of blank verse was considered as an unpalatable innovation. The book, however, advanced so far in its sale, that thirteen hun­dred were dispersed in two years. In April, 1669, the author received his second payment of five pounds. The second edition came forth in the year of his death, and the third in four years after that event: his widow, who inherited a right to the copy, sold all her claims to Simmons for eight pounds, in December, 1680; so that twenty-eight pounds, paid at different times in the course of thirteen years, is the whole pecuniary reward which this great performance pro­duced to the poet and his widow.

But although the emolument, which the author derived from his noblest production, was most deplorably inadequate to its merit, he was abundantly gratified with immediate and fervent applause from several accomplished judges of poetical genius. It has been generally supposed, that Para­dise Lost was neglected to a mortifying degree on its first appearance; and that the exalted poet consoled his spirit [Page 180] under such mortification by a magnanimous confidence in the justice of future ages, and a sanguine anticipation of his poetical immortality. The strength and dignity of his mind would indeed have armed him against any possible dis­appointment of his literary ambition; but such was the reception of his work, that he could not be disappointed. Johnson has vindicated the public on this point with judg­ment and success: ‘The sale of books (he observes) was not in Milton's age what it is in the present; the nation had been satisfied, from 1623 to 1664, that is forty-one years, with only two editions of the works of Shakespeare, which probably did not together make one thousand copies. The sale of thirteen hundred copies in two years, in opposition to so much recent enmity, and to a style of versification new to all, and disgusting to many, was an uncommon example of the prevalence of genius.’ These remarks are perfectly just; but when their author proceeds to say, ‘the admirers of Paradise Lost did not dare to publish their opinion,’ he seems to forget the very spirited eulogies that were, during the life of the poet, bestowed on that performance. Panegyrick can hardly assume a bolder tone than in the English and Latin verses addressed to Milton by Marvel and Barrow. He received other compliments not inferior to these. The muse of Dryden assured him, that he possessed the united excellen­cies of Homer and of Virgil; and, if we may rely on an anecdote related by Richardson, the Paradise Lost was an­nounced to the world in a very singular manner, that may [Page 181] be thought not ill-suited to the pre-eminence of the work. Sir John Denham, a man distinguished as a soldier, a sena­tor, and a poet, came into the House of Commons with a proof-sheet of Milton's new composition wet from the press; and being questioned concerning the paper in his hand, he said, it was ‘part of the noblest poem that ever was written in any language or in any age.’ Richardson, whose active and liberal affection for the poet led him to search with intelligent alacrity and success for every occur­rence that could redound to his honour, has recorded an­other incident, which must be particularly interesting to every lover of literary anecdote, as it discovers how the Pa­radise Lost was first introduced to Dryden, and with what fervency of admiration he immediately spoke of it. The Earl of Dorset and Fleetwood Shepard, the friend of Prior, sound the poem, according to this story, at a bookseller's in Little Britain, who, lamenting its want of circulation, en­treated the Earl to recommend it; Dorset, after reading it himself, sent it to Dryden, who said, in returning the book, "This man cuts us all out, and the ancients too." These were probably the real sentiments of Dryden on his first perusal of the poem; but as that unhappy genius was not blest with the independent magnanimity of Milton, his opi­nions were apt to fluctuate according to his interest, and we find him occasionally disposed to exalt or degrade the transcendent performance, which he could not but admire. As the six celebrated verses, in which he has complimented the English Homer, so much resemble what he said of him to Lord Dorset, it is probable that those verses were written [Page 182] while his mind was glowing with admiration from his first survey of the Paradise Lost; and as long as Milton lived, Dryden seems to have paid him the deference so justly due to his age, his genius, and his virtue. Aubrey relates, in the manuscript which I have repeatedly cited, that the poet laureat waited on Milton for the purpose of soliciting his permission to put his Paradise Lost into a drama. "Mr. Milton (says Aubrey) received him civilly, and told him, he would give him leave to tag his verses," an expression that probably alluded to a couplet of Marvel's, in his poetical eulogy on his friend. The opera which Dryden wrote, in consequence of this permission, entitled the State of Inno­cence, was not exhibited in the theatre, and did not appear in print till two years after the death of Milton, who is mentioned in becoming terms of veneration and gratitude in the preface. The drama itself is a very singular and striking performance; with all the beauties and all the de­fects of Dryden's animated unequal versification, it has pe­culiar claim to the attention of those, who may wish to in­vestigate the respective powers of English rhyme and blank verse, and it may furnish arguments to the partizans of each; for, if in many passages the images and harmony of Milton are deplorably injured by the necessity of rhym­ing, in a few instances, perhaps, rhyme has imparted even to the ideas of Milton new energy and grace. There are prefixt to this opera some very animated but injudicious verses by poor Nat. Lee, who has lavished the most exagge­rated praise on his friend Dryden, at the expence of the su­perior poet.

[Page 183]It is highly pleasing to reflect, that Milton, who had so many evils to sustain in the course of his chequered life, had yet the high gratification of being assured, by very competent judges, that he had gloriously succeeded in the prime object of his literary ambition, the great poetical at­chievement, which he projected in youth, and accomplished in old age. He probably received such animating assurances from many of his friends, whose applause, being intended for his private satisfaction, has not descended to our time; but when we recollect the honours already mentioned, that were paid to the living poet by Denham, Dryden, and Mar­vel, we may rest satisfied in the persuasion, that he enjoyed a grateful earnest of his future renown, and, according to the petition he addressed to Urania, ‘Fit audience found tho' few.’

If the spirit of a departed bard can be gratified by any circumstances of posthumous renown, it might gratify Milton to perceive, that his divine poem was first indebted for general celebrity to the admiration of Sommers and of Ad­dison, two of the most accomplished and most amiable of English names. Sommers promoted the first ornamented edition of Paradise Lost in 1688; and Addison wrote his celebrated papers on Milton in 1712.

But to return to the living author; in the year 1670, the great poet aspired to new distinction, by appearing in the character of an historian.—He had long meditated a work, which, in his time, was particularly wanted in our [Page 184] language, and which the greater cultivation bestowed by the present age on this branch of literature has not yet pro­duced in perfection—an eloquent and impartial history of England. Milton executed only six books, beginning with the most early fabulous period, and closing with the Norman conquest. "Why he should have given the first part (says Johnson) which he seems not to believe, and which is uni­versally rejected, it is difficult to conjecture." Had the cri­tic taken the trouble to peruse a few pages of the work in question his difficulty would have vanished; he would at least have found the motive of the author, if he had not esteemed it satisfactory:

"I have determined (says Milton) in speaking of the ancient and rejected British fables, to bestow the telling over even of these reputed tales, be it for nothing else but in favour of our English poets and rhetoricians, who by their art will know how to use them judiciously." This sentiment implies a striking fondness for works of imagina­tion, and a good natured disposition to promote them.

The historian discovers higher aims as he advances in his work, and expresses a moral and patriotic desire to make the lessons suggested by the early calamities of this nation a source of wisdom and virtue to his improving countrymen. The very passage, which was most likely to produce such an effect, was struck out of the publication by the Gothic hand of the licenser, an incident that seems to give new energy to all the noble arguments, which the injured author had formerly adduced in vindicating the liberty of the press.

The passage in question contained a very masterly sketch [Page 185] of the long parliament and assembly of divines, contrasting their situation and their misconduct, after the death of Charles the First, with those of the ancient Britons, when, by the departure of the Roman power, "they were left (according to the expression of the historian) to the sway of their own councils." The author gave a copy of this un­licenced parallel to the celebrated Earl of Anglesey, a man distinguished by erudition, with a liberal respect for genius, and though a minister of Charles the Second, a frequent visiter of Milton. This curious fragment was published in 1681, with a short preface, declaring, that it originally be­longed to the third book of Milton's History; and in the edition of his prose works, in 1738, it was properly replaced. The poet would have succeeded more eminently as an his­torian, had his talents been exercised on a period more fa­vourable to their exertion. We have reason to regret his not having executed the latter part of his original intention, instead of dwelling on the meagre and dark annals of Saxon barbarity. In his early history, however, there are passages of great force and beauty; his character of Alfred in parti­cular is worthy that engaging model of an accomplished monarch, and verifies a sentiment, which Milton professed, even while he was defending the commonwealth, that al­though a resolute enemy to tyrants, he was a since [...]e friend to such kings as merited the benediction of their people^*.

[Page 186]In 1671, the year after the first appearance of his history, he published the Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.

[Page 187]Many groundless remarks have been made on the supposed want of judgment in Milton to form a proper estimate of his own compositions. "His last poetical offspring (says Johnson) was his favourite; he could not, as Ell­wood relates, endure to have Paradise Lost preferred to Paradise Regained." In this brief passage, there is more than one misrepresentation. It is not Ellwood, but Philips, who speaks of Milton's esteem for his latter poem; and in­stead of saying that the author preferred it to his greater work, he merely intimates, that Milton was offended with the general censure, which condemned the Paradise Re­gained as infinitely inferior to the other. Instead of sup­posing, therefore, that the great poet was under the influ­ence of an absurd predilection, we have only reason to con­clude, that he heard with lively scorn such idle witticism as we find recorded by Toland, "that Milton might be seen in Paradise Lost, but not in Paradise Regained." His own accomplished mind, in which sensibility and judgment were proportioned to extraordinary imagination, most pro­bably [Page 188] assured him what is indisputably true, that uncom­mon energy of thought and felicity of composition are ap­parent in both performances, however different in design, dimension, and effect. To censure the Paradise Regained, because it does not more resemble the preceding poem, is hardly less absurd than it would be to condemn the moon for not being a sun, instead of admiring the two different luminaries, and feeling that both the greater and the less are visibly the work of the same divine and inimitable power.

Johnson has very liberally noticed one peculiarity in Milton, and calls it, with a benevolent happiness of expres­sion, ‘a kind of humble dignity, which did not disdain the meanest services to literature. The epic poet, the controvertist, the politician, having already descended to accommodate children with a book of rudiments, now, in the last years of his life, composed a book of Logic, for the initiation of students in philosophy, and pub­lished, 1672, Artis Logicae plenior Institutio ad Petri Rami Methodum concinnata, that is, a new scheme of Logic, according to the method of Ramus.’

It is so pleasing to find one great author speaking of an­other in terms, which do honour to both, that I transcribe, with singular satisfaction, the preceding passage of the emi­nent biographer, whose frequent and injurious asperity to Milton I have so repeatedly noticed, and must continue to notice, with reprehension and regret.

In the very moment of delivering the just encomium I have commended, the critic discovers an intemperate eager­ness [Page 189] to revile the object of his praise; for he proceeds to say of Milton, ‘I know not whether, even in this book, he did not intend an act of hostility against the universi­ties, for Ramus was one of the first oppugners of the old philosophy, who disturbed with innovations the quiet of the schools.’ Is there not a visible want of can­dour in shewing so wildly a wish to impute a very in­offensive and meritorious work of science to a malevolent motive?

Ramus was a man, whose writings and memory were justly regarded by Milton; for he resembled our great countryman in temperance, in fortitude, in passion for study, and, above all, in a brave and inflexible opposition to ig­norance, tyranny, and superstition; his life was a conti­nued struggle with these merciless enemies, and he perished at last with circumstances of peculiar barbarity, in the atro­cious massacre of St. Bartholomew.

A desire of rendering justice to the talents and virtues of such a sufferer in the cause of learning might surely be as­scribed to Milton, as a more probable and becoming mo­tive on this occasion, than dark intentions of hostility against the universities. It is but a sorry compliment to those universities to insinuate, that he engaged in warfare against them, who republished a simple and seasonable trea­tise on the management of human reason. Milton with great judgment augmented the logic of Ramus, and added to his system an abridgment of the Latin life, which Fre­gius had written, of its unfortunate author.

[Page 190]The long literary career of Milton was now drawing to­wards its termination, and it closed as it began, with a fervent regard to the interest of religion.—Alarmed by that encroachment, which the Romish superstition was making under the connivance of Charles the Second, and with the aid of his apostate brother, Milton published ‘A treatise of true Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration, and the best Means to prevent the Growth of Popery.’ The pa­triotic scope of this work was to unite and consolidate the jarring sects of the protestants, by persuading them to reci­procal indulgence, and to guard them against those impend­ing dangers from Rome, which, in a short period, burst upon this island, and very happily terminated in our signal deli­verance from many of those religious and political evils, which the spirit of Milton had, through a long life, most resolutely and conscientiously opposed.

His treatise against the growth of popery, which was pub­lished in 1673, was the last considerable performance that he gave to the world; but publication in some shape seems to have contributed to his amusement as long as he existed. In the same year he reprinted his smaller poems with the Tractate on Education; and in the year following, the last of his laborious life, he published his Familiar Letters, and a Declaration of the Poles in praise of their heroic sovereign, John Sobieski, translated from the Latin original. A brief history of Moscovia, which he appears to have compiled, in the early parts of his life, from various travellers who had visited that country, was published a few years after his death, and two of his compositions (both perhaps intended for the [Page 191] press) have probably perished; the first, a System of Theo­logy in Latin, that seems to have been entrusted to his friend Cyriac Skinner; the second, an Answer to a scur­rilous libel upon himself, which his nephew supposes him to have suppressed from a just contempt of his reviler.

Soon after his marriage in 1661, he had removed from Jewin-street to a house in the Artillery-walk, leading to Bunhill-fields, a spot that to his enthusiastic admirers may appear consecrated by his genius: here he resided in that period of his days, when he was peculiarly entitled to vene­ration; here he probably finished no less than three of his most admirable works; and here, with a dissolution to easy that it was unperceived by the persons in his chamber, he closed a life, clouded indeed by uncommon and various calamities, yet ennobled by the constant exercise of such rare endowments as render his name, perhaps, the very first in that radiant and comprehensive list, of which England, the most fertile of countries in the produce of mental power, has reason to be proud.

For some years he had suffered much from the gout, and in July, 1674, he found his constitution so broken by that distemper, that he was willing to prepare for his departure from the world. With this view he informed his brother Christopher, who was then a bencher in the Inner Temple, of the disposition he wished to make of his property. "Bro­ther (said the invalid) the portion due to me from Mr. Powell, my first wise's father, I leave to the unkind chil­dren I had by her; but I have received no part of it; and my will and meaning is, they shall have no other benefit of my [Page 192] estate than the said portion, and what I have besides done for them, they having been very undutiful to me; and all the residue of my estate I leave to the disposal of Elizabeth, my loving wife." Such is the brief testament, which Mil­ton dictated to his brother, about the 20th of July, but which Christopher does not appear to have committed to paper till a few days after the decease of the testator, who expired on Sunday night, the 15th of November, 1674. "All his learned and great friends in London, (says To­land) not without a friendly concourse of the vulgar, accom­panied his body to the church of St. Giles, near Cripple­gate, where he lies buried in the chancel." This bio­grapher, who, though he had the misfortune to think very differently from Milton on the great article of religion, yet never fails to speak of him with affectionate respect, in­dulged a pleasing expectation, when he wrote his life in the close of the last century, that national munificence would speedily raise a monument worthy of the poet, to protect and to honour his remains. To the discredit of our coun­try she has failed to pay this decent tribute to the memory of a man, from whose genius she has derived so much glory; but an individual, Mr. Benson, in the year 1737, placed a bust of the great author in Westminster Abbey; an act of liberality that does him credit, though Johnson and Pope have both satyrized the monumental inscription with a de­gree of cynical asperity: such asperity appears unseasonable, because all the ostentation, so severely censured in Mr. Ben­son, amounts merely to his having said, in the plainest manner, that he raised the monument; and to his having [Page 193] added to his own name a common enumeration of the offices he possessed; a circumstance in which candour might have discovered rather more modesty than pride.—Affluence ap­pears particularly amiable when paying a voluntary tribute to neglected genius, even in the grave; nor is Benson the only individual of ample fortune, who has endeared himself to the lovers of literature by generous endeavours to promote the celebrity of Milton. Affectionate admirers of the poet will honour the memory of the late Mr. Hollis, in recollect­ing that he devoted much time and money to a similar pur­suit; and they will regret that he was unable to discover the Italian verses, and the marble bust, which he diligently sought for in Italy, on a suggestion that such memorials of our poetic traveller had been carefully preserved in that country. But from this brief digression on the recent ad­mirers of Milton, let us return to his family at the time of his decease.

His will was contested by the daughters, whose undutiful conduct it condemned: being deficient in form, it was set aside, and letters of administration were granted to the widow, who is said to have allotted an hundred pounds to each daughter, a sum which, being probably too little in their opinion, and too much in her's, would naturally pro­duce reciprocal animosity and censure between the contend­ing parties.

It has been already observed, that the recent discovery of this forgotten will, and the allegations annexed to it, throw considerable light on the domestic life of Milton; and the more insight we can gain into his social and sequestered [Page 194] hours, the more we shall discover, that he was not less entitled to private affection, than to public esteem; but let us contemplate his person before we proceed to a minuter examination of his mind and manners.

So infatuated with rancour were the enemies of this illustrious man, that they delineated his form, as they re­presented his character, with the utmost extravagance of malevolent falshood: he was not only compared to that monster of deformity, the eyeless Polypheme, but described as a diminutive, bloodless, and shrivelled creature. Expres­sions of this kind, in which absurdity and malice are equally apparent, induced him to expose the contemptible virulence of his revilers by a brief description of his own figure^*. He [Page 195] represents himself as a man of moderate stature, not par­ticularly slender, and so far endued with strength and spirit, that as he always wore a sword, he wanted not, in his healthy season of life, either skill or courage to use it; having practised fencing with great assiduity, he considered himself as a match for any antagonist, however superior to him in muscular force; his countenance (he says) was so far from being bloodless, that when turned of forty he was generally allowed to have the appearance of being ten years younger; even his eyes (he adds) though utterly de­prived of sight, did not betray their imperfection, but on the contrary appeared as speckless and as lucid as if his powers of vision had been peculiarly acute—‘In this article alone’ (says Milton) ‘and much against my will, I am an hypocrite.’

Such is the interesting portrait, which this great writer has left us of himself. Those who had the happiness of knowing him personally, speak in the highest terms even of his personal endowments, and seem to have regarded him as a model of manly grace and dignity in his figure and deportment.

"His harmonical and ingenuous soul" (says Aubrey) "dwelt in a beautiful and well proportioned body." ‘In toto nusquam corpore menda suit.’ His hair was a light brown, his eyes dark grey, and his complexion so fair, that at college, according to his own expression, he was styled "The Lady," an appellation [Page 196] which he could not relish; but he consoled himself under absurd raillery on the delicacy of his person, by recollecting that similar raillery had been lavished on those manly and eminent characters of the ancient world, Demosthenes and Hortensius. His general appearance approached not in any degree to effeminacy. "His deportment" (says Anthony Wood) ‘was affable, and his gait erect and manly, be­speaking courage and undauntedness.’ Richardson, who laboured with affectionate enthusiasm to acquire and com­municate all possible information concerning the person and manners of Milton, has left the two following sketches of his figure at an advanced period of life.

"An ancient clergyman of Dorsetshire (Dr. Wright) found John Milton in a small chamber hung with rusty green, sitting in an elbow chair, and dressed neatly in black, pale but not cadaverous, his hands and fingers gouty and with chalk stones."

"He used also to sit, in a grey coarse cloth coat, at the door of his house near Bunhill-fields, in warm sunny weather, to enjoy the fresh air, and so, as well as in his room, received the visits of people of distinguished parts as well as quality." It is probable, that Milton, in his youth, was, in some measure, indebted to the engaging graces of his person for that early introduction into the politest society, both in England and abroad, which improved the natural sweetness of his character (so visible in all his genuine portraits) and led him to unite with profound erudition, and with the sublimest talents, an endearing and cheerful [Page 197] delicacy of manners, very rarely attained by men, whose application to study is continual and intense.

The enemies of Milton indeed (and his late biographer I must reluctantly include under that description) have la­boured to fix upon him a fictitious and most unamiable character of austerity and harshness. ‘What we know (says Johnson) of Milton's character in domestic relations is, that he was severe and arbitrary. His family consisted of women, and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and infe­rior beings; that his own daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought woman made only for obedience, and man for rebellion.’ This is assuredly the intemperate language of hatred, and very far from being consonant to truth.

As it was thought a sufficient defence of Sophocles, when he was barbarously accused of mental imbecility by his un­natural children, to read a portion of his recent dramatic works, so, I am confident, the citation of a few verses from our English bard may be enough to clear him from a charge equally groundless, and almost as ungenerous.

No impartial reader of genuine sensibility will deem it possible, that the poet could have entertained a Turkish contempt of females, who has thus delineated woman:

A description so complete could arise only from such ex­quisite feelings in the poet, as insured to every deserving female his tenderest regard. This argument might be still more enforced by a passage in the speech of Raphael; but the preceding verses are, I trust, sufficient to counteract the uncandid attempt of the acrimonious biographer to preju­dice the fairest part of the creation against a poet, who has surpassed his peers in delineating their charms, whose poetry, a more enchanting mirror than the lake that he describes in Paradise, represents their mental united to their personal graces, and exhibits in perfection all the loveliness of woman.

As to Milton's depressing his daughters by a mean and penurious education, it is a calumny resting only on a report, that he would not allow them the advantage of learn­ing to write. This is evidently false, since Aubrey, who was personally acquainted with the poet, and who had pro­bably consulted his widow in regard to many particulars of his life, expressly affirms, that his youngest daughter was his amanuensis; a circumstance of which my friend Romney has happily availed himself to decorate the folio edition of this life with a production of his pencil. The youngest [Page 199] daughter of Milton had the most frequent opportunities of knowing his temper, and she happens to be the only one of his children who has delivered a deliberate account of it; but her account, instead of confirming Johnson's idea of her fa­ther's domestic severity, will appear to the candid reader to refute it completely. "She spoke of him (says Richard­son) with great tenderness; she said he was delightful com­pany, the life of the conversation, and that on account of a flow of subject, and an unaffected cheerfulness and civility." It was this daughter who related the extraordinary circum­stance, that she and one of her sisters read to their father several languages, which they did not understand: it is re­markable, that she did not speak of it as a hardship; nor could it be thought an intolerable grievance by an af­fectionate child, who thus assisted a blind parent in labour­ing for the maintenance of his family. Such an employ­ment, however, must have been irksome; and the considerate father, in finding that it was so, "sent out his children (according to the expression of his nephew) to learn some curious and ingenious sorts of manufacture, particularly em­broideries in gold or silver." That he was no penurious parent is strongly proved by an expression that he made use of in speaking of his will, when he declared, that "he had made provision for his children in his life-time, and had spent the greatest part of his estate in providing for them." It is the more barbarous to arraign the poet for domestic cruelty, because he appears to have suffered from the singular tenderness and generosity of his nature. He had reason to lament that excess of indulgence, with which [Page 200] forgave and received again his disobedient and long-alie­nated wife, since their re-union not only disquieted his days, but gave birth to daughters, who seem to have inhe­rited the perversity of their mother:

These pathetic lines, in a speech of his Sampson Agonistes, strike me as a forcible allusion to his own connubial infeli­city. If in his first marriage he was eminently unhappy, his success in the two last turned the balance of fortune in his favour. That his second wife deserved, possessed, and re­tained his affection, is evident from his sonnet occasioned by her death; of the care and kindness which he had long ex­perienced from the partner of his declining life, he spoke with tender gratitude to his brother, in explaining his testa­mentary intention; and we are probably indebted to the care and kindness, which the aged poet experienced from this affectionate guardian, for the happy accomplishment of his inestimable works. A blind and desolate father must be utterly unequal to the management of disobedient daugh­ters conspiring against him; the anguish he endured from their filial ingratitude, and the base deceptions, with which they continually tormented him, must have rendered even the strongest mind very unfit for poetical application. The [Page 201] which he concluded by the advice and the aid of his friend Dr. Paget, seems to have been his only resource against a most exasperating and calamitous species of domes­tic disquietude; it appears, therefore, not unreasonable to regard those immortal poems, which recovered tranquillity enabled him to produce, as the fruits of that marriage. As matrimony has, perhaps, annihilated many a literary design, let it be remembered to its honour, that it probably gave birth to the brightest offspring of literature.

The two eldest daughters of Milton appear to me utterly unworthy of their father; but those who adopt the dark prejudices of Johnson, and believe with him, that the great poet was an austere domestic tyrant, will find, in their idea of the father, an apology for his children, whose destiny in the world I shall immediately mention, that I may have oc­casion to speak of them no more. Anne, the eldest, who with a deformed person had a pleasing face, married an archi­tect, and died, with her first infant, in child-bed. Mary, the second, and apparently the most deficient in affection to her father, died unmarried. Deborah, who was the favourite of Milton, and who, long after his decease, discovered, on a casual sight of his genuine portrait, very affecting emo­tions of filial tenderness and enthusiasm, even Deborah de­serted him without his knowledge, not in consequence of his paternal severity, of which she was very far from com­plaining, but, as Richardson intimates, from a disgust she had conceived against her mother-in-law. On quitting the house of her father, she went to Ireland with a lady, and afterwards became the wife of Mr. Clarke, a weaver, in [Page 202] Spital-fields. As her family was numerous, and her cir­cumstances not affluent, the liberal Addison made her a pre­sent, from his regard to the memory of her father, and in­tended to procure her some decent establishment, but died before he could accomplish his generous design. From Queen Caroline, she received fifty guineas, a donation as ill proportioned to the rank of the donor as to the mental dignity of the great genius, whose indigent daughter was the object of this unprincely munificence.— Mrs. Clarke had ten children, but none of them appear to have attracted public regard, till Dr. Birch and Dr. Newton, two benevolent and respectable biographers of the poet, discovered his grand-daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Foster, keep­ing a little chandler's-shop in the city, poor, aged, and in­firm; they publicly spoke of her condition; Johnson was then writing as the coadjutor of Lauder in his attempt to sink the glory of Milton; but as the critic's charity was still greater than his spleen, he seized the occasion of recom­mending, under Lauder's name, this necessitous descendant of the great poet to the beneficence of his country; Comus was represented for her benefit, in the year 1750, and John­son, to his honour, contributed a prologue on the occasion, in which noble sentiments are nobly expressed.

The poor grand-daughter of Milton gained but one hun­dred and thirty pounds by this public benefaction; this sum, however, small as it was, afforded peculiar comfort to her declining age, by enabling her to retire to Islington with her husband: she had seven children, who died before her, and by her own death it is probable that the line of [Page 203] the poet became extinct. Let us hasten from this painful survey of his progeny to the more enlivening contemplation of his rare mental endowments. The most diligent re­searches into all that can elucidate the real temper of Milton only confirm the opinion, that his native characteristics were mildness and magnanimity. In controversy his mind was undoubtedly overheated, and passages may be quoted from his prose works, that are certainly neither mild nor mag­nanimous; but if his controversial asperity is compared with the outrageous insolence of his opponents, even that asperity will appear moderation; in social intercourse he is repre­sented as peculiarly courteous and engaging. When the celebrity of his Latin work made him esteemed abroad, many enquiries were made concerning his private character among his familiar acquaintance, and the result of such en­quiry was, that mildness and affability were his distinguish­ing qualities. "Virum esse miti comique ingenio aiunt," says the celebrate Heinsius, in a letter that he wrote con­cerning Milton, in the year 1651, to Gronovius. Another eminent foreigner represents him in the same pleasing light, and from the best information. Vossius, who was at that time in Sweden, and who mentions the praise, which his royal patroness Christina bestowed on Milton's recent defence of the English people, informs his friend Heinsius, that he had obtained a very particular account of the author from a relation of his own, the learned Junius, who wrote the elaborate and interesting history of ancient painting, resided in England, and particularly cultivated the intimacy of Milton.

[Page 204]Indeed, when we reflect on the poet's uncommon tender­ness towards his parents, and all the advantages of his early life, both at home and abroad, we have every reason to be­lieve, that his manners were singularly pleasing. He was fond of refined female society, and appears to have been very fortunate in two female friends of distinction, the Lady Mar­garet Ley, whose society consoled him when he was morti­fied by the desertion of his first wife, and the no less accom­plished Lady Ranelagh, who had placed her son under his care, and who probably assisted him, when he was a wi­dower and blind, with friendly directions for the manage­ment of his female infants. A passage in one of his letters to her son suggests this idea; for he condoles with his young correspondent, then at the University, on the loss they would both sustain by the long absence of his most excellent mother, passing at that time into Ireland; "her departure must grieve us both," says Milton, "for to me also she sup­plied the place of every friend^†;" an expression full of tenderness and regret, highly honourable to the lady, and a pleasing memorial of that sensibility and gratitude, which I am persuaded we should have seen most eminent in the cha­racter of Milton, if his English letters had been fortunately preserved, particularly his letters to this interesting lady, whose merits are commemorated in an eloquent sermon, preached by bishop Burnet, on the death of her brother, that mild and accomplished model of virtue and of learning, Robert Boyle. Lady Ranelagh must have been one of the [Page 205] exemplary and engaging characters that ever existed, since we find she was the darling sister of this illustrious phi­losopher, and the favourite friend of a poet still more illustri­ous. Four of Milton's Latin letters are addressed to her son, and they blend with moral precepts to the young student respectful and affectionate praise of his mother^*.

In the Latin correspondence of Milton we have some ves­tiges of his sentiments concerning the authors of antiquity; and it is remarkable, that in a deliberate opinion on the me­rits of Sallust^†, he prefers him to all the Roman histo­rians. Milton, however, did not form himself as a writer on any Roman model: being very early most anxious to excel [Page 206] in literature, he wisely attached himself to those prime examples of literary perfection, the Greeks; among the poets he particularly delighted in Euripides and Homer; his favourites in prose seem to have been Plato and Demosthenes; the first peculiarly fit to give richness, purity, and lustre to the fancy; the second, to invigorate the understanding, and inspire the fervid energy of public virtue. It is a very just remark of Lord Monboddo, that even the poetical speeches in Paradise Lost derive their consummate propriety and elo­quence from the fond and enlightened attention with which the poet had studied the most perfect orator of Athens: the studies of Milton, however, were very extensive; he appears to have been familiar not only with all the best authors of antiquity, but with those of every refined language in Europe; Italian, French, Spanish, and Portugueze. Great erudition has been often supposed to operate as an incum­brance on the finer faculties of the mind; but let us ob­serve to its credit, the sublimest of poets was also the most learned: of Italian literature he was particularly fond, as we may collect from one of his letters to a professor of that lan­guage, and from the ease and spirit of his Italian verses. To the honour of modern Italy it may be said, that she had a considerable share in forming the genius of Milton. In Tasso, her brightest ornament, he found a character highly worthy of his affectionate emulation, both as a poet and as a man; this accomplished personage had, indeed, ended his illustrious and troubled life several years before Milton visited his country; but he was yet living in the memory of his ardent friend Manso, and through the medium of Manso's, [Page 207] conversation his various excellencies made, I am persuaded, a forcible and permanent impression on the heart and fancy of our youthful countryman. It was hardly the example of Trissino, as Johnson supposes, that tempted Milton to his bold experiment of blank verse; for Trissino's epic poem is a very heavy performance, and had sunk into such oblivion in Italy, that the literary friend and biographer of Tasso considers that greater poet as the first person who enriched the Italian language with valuable blank verse: "our early works of that kind," says Manso, "are translations from the Latin, and those not successful." The poem in blank verse, for which this amiable biographer applauds his friend, is an extensive work, in seven books, on the Seven Days of the Creation, a subject that has engaged the poets of many coun­tries. The performance of Tasso was begun at the house of his friend Manso, and at the suggestion of a lady, the ac­complished mother of the Marquis. As this poem is formed from the Bible, and full of religious enthusiasm, it probably influenced the English visiter of Manso in his choice of blank verse. Tasso was a voluminous author, and we have reason to believe that Milton was familiar with all his composi­tions, as the exquisite eulogy on connubial affection, in the Paradise Lost, is founded on a prose composition in favour of marriage, addressed by the Italian poet to one of his re­lations^*; but Milton, who was perhaps of all authors the [Page 208] addicted to imitation, rarely imitates even Tasso in composition: in life, indeed, he copied him more closely, and to his great poetical compeer of Italy he discovers a very striking resemblance in application to study, in tem­perance of diet, in purity of morals, and in fervency of devotion. The Marquis of Villa, in closing his life of Tasso, has enumerated all the particular virtues by which he was distinguished; these were all equally conspicuous in Milton; and we may truly say of him, what Manso says of the great Italian poet, that the preference of virtue to every other consideration was the predominant passion of his life.

Enthusiasm was the characteristic of his mind; in poli­tics, it made him sometimes too generously credulous, and sometimes too rigorously decisive; but in poetry it exalted him to such a degree of excellence as no man has hitherto surpassed; nor is it probable that in this province he will ever be excelled; for although in all the arts there are un­doubtedly points of perfection much higher than any mor­tal has yet attained, still it requires such a coincidence of so many advantages depending on the influence both of na­ture and of destiny to raise a great artist of any kind, that the world has but little reason to expect productions of poetical genius superior to the Paradise Lost. There was a bold yet refined originality of conception, which cha­racterised the mental powers of Milton, and give him the highest claim to distinction: we are not only indebted to him for having extended and ennobled the province of epic poetry, but he has another title to our regard, as the founder of that recent and enchanting English art, which has em­bellished [Page 209] our country, and, to speak the glowing language of a living bard very eloquent in its praise,

The elegant historian of modern gardening, Lord Or­ford, and the two accomplished poets, who have celebrated its charms both in France and England, De Lille and Ma­son, have, with great justice and felicity of expression, paid their homage to Milton, as the beneficent genius, who be­stowed upon the world this youngest and most lovely of the arts. As a contrast to the Miltonic garden, I may point out to the notice of the reader, what has escaped, I think, all the learned writers on this engaging subject, the garden of the imperious Duke of Alva, described in a poem of the ce­lebrated Lope de Vega. The sublime vision of Eden, as Lord Orford truly calls it, proves indeed, as the same writer ob­serves, how little the poet suffered from the loss of sight. The native disposition of Milton, and his personal infirmity, conspired to make contemplation his chief business and chief enjoyment: few poets have devoted so large a portion of their time to intense and regular study; yet he often made a pause of some months in the progress of his great work, if we may confide in the circumstantial narrative of his ne­phew. "I had the perusal of it from the very beginning," says Philips, "for some years, as I went from time to time to visit him, in parcels of ten, twenty, or thirty verses at a time (which, being written by whatever hand came next, [Page 210] might possibly want correction as to the orthography and pointing). Having, as the summer came on, not been shewed any for a considerable while, and desiring the reason thereof, was answered that his vein never happily flowed but from the autumual equinox to the vernal."

Johnson takes occasion, from this anecdote, to treat the sensations of Milton with sarcastic severity, and to deride him for submitting to the influence of the seasons; he la­vishes ridicule, not less acrimonious, on the great poet, for having yielded to a fashionable dread of evils still more fan­tastic. "There prevailed in his time (says the critic) an opi­nion that the world was in its decay, and that we have had the misfortune to be born in the decrepitude of nature." Johnson exposes, with great felicity of expression, this absurd idea, of which his own frame of body and mind was a com­plete refutation; but instead of deriding the great poet for harbouring so weak a conceit, he might have recollected that Milton himself has spurned this chimera of timid ima­gination in very spirited Latin verse, written in his twen­tieth year, and expressly against the folly of supposing na­ture impaired.

The spirit of the poet was, in truth, little formed for yielding to any weaknesses of fancy that could impede men­tal exertion; and we may consider it as one of the striking peculiarities of his character, that with an imagination so excursive he possessed a mind so industrious.

His studious habits are thus described by his acquain­tance Aubrey and others, who collected their account from his widow:—He rose at four in the summer, at five in the winter, and regularly began the day by hearing a chapter in the Hebrew Bible; it was read to him by a man, who, after this duty, left him to meditation of some hours, and, returning at seven, either read or wrote for him till twelve; he then allowed himself an hour for exercise, which was usually walking, and when he grew blind, the occasional resource of a swing: after an early and temperate dinner he commonly allotted some time to music, his favourite amusement; and his own musical talents happily furnished him with a pleasing relaxation from his severer pursuits; he was able to vary his instrument, as he played both on the bass viol and the organ, with the advantage of an agree­able voice, which his father had probably taught him to cultivate in his youth. This regular custom of the great [Page 212] to indulge himself in musical relaxation after food, has been recently praised as favourable to mental exertion, in producing all the good effects of sleep, with none of its disadvantages, by an illustrious scholar, who, like Milton, unites the passion and the talent of poetry to habits of in­tense and diversified application. Sir William Jones, in the third volume of Asiatic Researches, has recommended, from his own experience, this practice of Milton, who from mu­sic returned to study; at eight he took a light supper, and at nine retired to bed.

If such extreme regularity could be preserved at any pe­riod, it must have been in the closing years of his life. While he was in office his time was undoubtedly much en­gaged, not only by official attendance, but by his inter­course with learned foreigners, as the parliament allowed him a weekly table for their reception. The Latin com­positions of Milton had rendered him, on the continent, an object of idolatry; "and strangers (says Wood, who was far from being partial to his illustrious contemporary) vi­sited the house where he was born." Even in his latter days, when he is supposed to have been neglected by his countrymen, intelligent foreigners were solicitous to con­verse with him as an object of their curiosity and venera­tion; they regarded him, and very justly, as the prime wonder of England; for he was, in truth, a person so ex­traordinary, that it may be questioned if any age or nation has produced his parallel. Is there, in the records of lite­rature, an author to be found, who, after gaining such ex­tensive celebrity as a political disputant, cast off the mortal [Page 213] of a polemic, and arose in the purest splendor of poetical immortality?

Biographers are frequently accused of being influenced by affection for their subject; to a certain degree it is right that they should be so; for what is biography in its fairest point of view? a tribute paid by justice and esteem to ge­nius and to virtue; and never is this tribute more pleasing or more profitable to mankind, than when it is liberally paid, with all the fervor and all the fidelity of friendship: the chief delight and the chief utility that arises from this at­tractive branch of literature consists in the affectionate in­terest, which it displays and communicates in favour of the talents and probity that it aspires to celebrate; hence the most engaging pieces of biography are those that have been written by relations of the deceased. This remark is ex­emplified in the life of Agricola by Tacitus, and in that of Racine, the dramatic poet, written by his son, who was also a poet, and addressed to his grandson.

It has been the lot of Milton to have his life frequently described, and recently, by a very powerful author, who, had he loved the character he engaged to delineate, might, perhaps, have satisfied the admirers of the poet, and closed the list of his numerous biographers. But the very won­derful mind of Johnson was so embittered by prejudice, that in delineating a character confessedly pre-eminent in eminent accomplishments, in genius, and in piety, he per­petually endeavours to represent him as unamiable, and in­stead of attributing any mistaken opinions that he might entertain to such sources as charity and reason conspire to [Page 214] suggest, imputes them to supposed vices in his mind, most foreign to his nature, and the very worst that an enemy could imagine.

In the course of this narrative I have considered it as a duty incumbent upon me to notice and counteract, as they occurred, many important strokes of the hostility which I am now la­menting; these become still more remarkable in that por­tion of the biographer's labour to which I am at length arrived; it is in diffecting the mind of Milton, if I may use such an expression, that Johnson indulges the injurious in­temperance of his hatred. ‘It is to be suspected (he says) that his predominant desire was to destroy rather than establish; and that he felt not so much the love of li­berty as repugnance to authority.’ Such a suspicion may indeed be harboured by political rancour, but it must be in direct opposition to justice and truth; for of all men who have written or acted in the service of liberty, there is no individual, who has proved more completely, both by his language and his life, that he made a perfect distinction between liberty and licentiousness. No human spirit could be more sincerely a lover of just and beneficent authority; for no man delighted more in peace and order; no man has written more eloquently in their praise, or given sub­limer proofs of his own personal attachment to them by the regulation of his own orderly and peaceful studies. If he hated power (as Johnson asserts) in every established form, he hated not its salutary influence, but its pernicious exer­tions. Vehement as he occasionally was against kings and prelates, he spoke of the sectaries with equal indignation [Page 215] and abhorrence when they also became the agents of perse­cution; and as he had fully seen, and has forcibly exposed, the gross failings of republican reformers, had his life been extended long enough to witness the Revolution, which he might have beheld without suffering the decre­pitude or imbecility of extreme old age, he would probably have exulted as warmly as the staunchest friend of our pre­sent constitution can exult, in that temperate and happy reformation of monarchical enormities.

Johnson also intimates, that he was a shallow politician, who supposed money to be the chief good, though with singular inconsistency he at the same time confesses, "that fortune seems not to have had much of his care."

Money, in fact, had so little influence over the elevated mind of Milton, that from his want of attention to it he sustained such losses as, according to his nephew's expres­sion, "might have ruined a man less temperate than he was." Two thousand pounds he is said to have lost by en­trusting it to government, and as much in a private loan, without sufficient security.

"Towards the latter part of his time," says one of his early biographers, "he contracted his library, both because the heirs he left could not make a right use of it, and that he thought he might fell it more to their advantage than they could be able to do themselves. His enemies reported, that poverty constrained him thus to part with his books; and were this true it would be a great disgrace, not to him (for persons of the highest merits have been often reduced to that condition) but to any country that should have no more [Page 216] to probity or learning. This story, however, is so false, that he died worth fifteen hundred pounds, besides all his goods."

Such are the remarks of Toland on the pecuniary cir­cumstances of the poet; they shew with becoming spirit, that he was not reduced by absolute indigence to the sale of his library; yet every reader, whose literary feelings are acute, must regret, that the old age of Milton was not guarded and enlivened by such affluence as might have saved him from a measure, in which those who have a passion for books must suppose him to have suffered some degree of mortification.

The necessities into which many deserving men of letters have fallen towards the close of life, and in various countries, may be regarded as an universal disgrace to civilized society, which the improving refinement and liberality of mankind ought effectually to remove. Literature, which is so emi­nently beneficial to a nation, is frequently ruinous to worthy individuals most fervently attached to it; and it should be regarded as a duty, therefore, by every polished people, to provide a public fund, which might afford a becoming com­petence to the advanced life of every illustrious scholar, whose public labours entitle him to that honourable distinc­tion. Such meritorious veterans in literature as Milton and his late aged biographer should have been preserved, in their declining days, from every shadow of indigence, by the public gratitude of the nation to whom they had devoted their intellectual service. What friend to letters and to genius could fail to wish affluent comfort to the closing [Page 217] life of such authors, however he might condemn the ex­cesses of republican severity in the one, or those of servile and censorial bigotry in the other?

There can hardly be any contemplation more painful, than to dwell on the virulent excesses of eminent and good men; yet the utility of such contemplation may be equal to its pain. What mildness and candour should it not instil ordinary into mortals to observe, that even genius and virtue weaken their title to respect, in proportion as they recede from that evangelical charity, which should influence every man in his judgment of another.

The strength and the acuteness of sensation, which partly constitute genius, have a great tendency to produce viru­lence, if the mind is not perpetually on its guard against that subtle, insinuating, and corrosive passion, hatred against all whose opinions are opposite to our own. Johnson pro­fessed, in one of his letters, to love a good hater; and in the Latin correspondence of Milton, there are words that imply a similarity of sentiment; they both thought there might be a sanctified bitterness, to use an expression of Milton, to­wards political and religious opponents; yet surely these two devout men were both wrong, and both in some degree unchristian in this principle. To what singular iniquities of judgment such a principle may lead, we might, perhaps, have had a most striking, and a double proof, had it been possible for these two energetic writers to exhibit alternately a portrait of each other. Milton, adorned with every grace­ful endowment, highly and holily accomplished as he was, appears, in the dark colouring of Johnson, a most unamia­ble [Page 218] being; but could he revisit earth in his mortal charac­ter, with a wish to retaliate, what a picture might be drawn, by that sublime and offended genius, of the great mo­ralist, who has treated him with such excess of asperity. The passions are powerful colourists, and marvellous adepts in the art of exaggeration; but the portraits executed by love (famous as he is for overcharging them) are infinitely more faithful to nature, than gloomy sketches from the heavy hand of hatred; a passion not to be trusted or indulged even in minds of the highest purity or power; since hatred, though it may enter the field of contest under the banner of justice, yet generally becomes so blind and outrageous, from the heat of contention, as to execute, in the name of virtue, the worst purposes of vice. Hence arises that species of calumny the most to be regretted, the calumny lavished by men of talents and worth on their equals or superiors, whom they have rashly and blindly hated for a difference of opi­nion. To such hatred the fervid and opposite characters, who gave rise to this observation, were both more inclined, perhaps, by nature and by habit, than christianity can allow. The freedom of these remarks on two very great, and equally devout, though different writers, may possibly offend the partizans of both: in that case my consolation will be, that I have endeavoured to speak of them with that tempe­rate, though undaunted sincerity, which may satisfy the spirit of each in a purer state of existence. There is one charac­teristic in Milton, which ought to be considered as the chief source of his happiness and his fame; I mean his early and perpetual attachment to religion. It must gratify every [Page 219] christian to reflect, that the man of our country most emi­nent for energy of mind, for intenseness of application, and for frankness and intrepidity in asserting whatever he be­lieved to be the cause of truth, was so confirmedly devoted to christianity, that he seems to have made the Bible, not only the rule of his conduct, but the prime director of his genius. His poetry flowed from the scripture, as if his un­paralleled poetical powers had been expressly given him by Heaven for the purpose of imparting to religion such lustre as the most splendid of human faculties could bestow. As in the Paradise Lost he seems to emulate the sublimity of Moses and the prophets, it appears to have been his wish, in the Paradise Regained, to copy the sweetness and simpli­city of the milder evangelists. If the futile remarks that were made upon the latter work, on its first appearance, excited the spleen of the great author, he would probably have felt still more indignant, could he have seen the com­ment of Warburton. That disgusting writer, whose criti­cal dictates form a fantastic medley of arrogance, acuteness, and absurdity, has asserted, that the plan of Paradise Re­gained is very unhappy, and that nothing was easier than to have invented a good one.

Much idle censure seems to have been thrown on more than one of Milton's poetical works, from want of due atten­tion to the chief aim of the poet:—if we fairly consider it in regard to Paradise Regained, the aim I allude to, as it probably occasioned, will completely justify, the plan which the presumptuous critic has so superciliously condemned. Milton had already executed one extensive divine poem, [Page 220] peculiarly distinguished by richness and sublimity of descrip­tion; in framing a second, he would naturally wish to vary its effect; to make it rich in moral sentiment, and sublime in its mode of unfolding the highest wisdom that man can learn; for this purpose it was necessary to keep all the orna­mental parts of the poem in due subordination to the precep­tive. This delicate and difficult point is accomplished with such felicity, they are blended together with such exquisite harmony and mutual aid, that instead of arraigning the plan, we might rather doubt if any possible change could improve it; assuredly, there is no poem of epic form, where the sublimest moral instruction is so forcibly and abundantly united to poetical delight: the splendour of the poet does not blaze, indeed, so intensely as in his larger production; here he resembles the Apollo of Ovid, softening his glory in speaking to his son, and avoiding to dazzle the fancy, that he may descend into the heart. His dignity is not im­paired by his tenderness. The Paradise Regained is a poem, that deserves to be particularly recommended to ardent and ingenuous youth, as it is admirably calculated to inspire that spirit of self-command, which is, as Milton esteemed it, the truest heroism, and the triumph of christianity.

It is not my intention to enter into a critical analysis of the beauties and the blemishes that are visible in the poetry of Milton, not only because Addison and Johnson have both written admirably on his greatest work, but because my most excellent friend, the poet (whose spirit I esteem most congenial to that of Milton) is engaged in such illus­tration of his honoured predecessor; I shall therefore con­fine [Page 221] myself to a single essay, detached from this narrative, under the title of "Conjectures on the Origin of the Para­dise Lost."

I must not, however, omit to speak here, as I have engaged to do, of the character bestowed by Johnson on the princi­pal performance of the poet; the greatest part of that cha­racter is, perhaps, the most splendid tribute that was ever paid by one powerful mind to another. Aristotle, Longinus, and Quintilian, have not spoken of their favourite Homer with more magnificence of praise; yet the character, taken alto­gether, is a golden image, that has lower parts of iron and of clay. The critic seems to prepare a diadem of the richest jewels; he places them, most liberally, on the head of the poet; but in the moment of adjusting his radiant gift, he breathes upon it such a vapour of spleen, as almost annihi­lates its lustre.

After displaying, in the noblest manner, many of the pe­culiar excellencies in the poem, he says, "its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure; we read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and overburthened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for compa­nions."

Injurious as these remarks are to the poet, let us ascribe them, not to the virulence of intended detraction, but to the want of poetical sensibility in the critic; a want that may be sufficiently proved, by comparing this account of the effect produced by Paradise Lost on his own feelings with its effect on a spirit truly poetical. That enchanting poem, The Task, very happily furnishes such an illustration; it is [Page 222] thus that a mind attuned by nature to poetry describes the effect in question, as produced even in childhood.

But the little delight that Johnson confesses himself to have taken in the poetry of Milton was rather his misfor­tune than his fault; it merits pity more than reproach, as it partly arose from constitutional infelicity, and the very wide difference between the native turn of his mind and that of the poet: never were two spirits less congenial, or two christian scholars, who differed more completely in their sentiments of poetry, politics, and religion. In tempera­ment, as well as in opinions, they were the reverse of each other; the one was sanguine to excess, the other melan­choly in the extreme. Milton ‘Might sit in the centre and enjoy bright day;’ but Johnson,

Such was the great contrast between these two extraor­dinary men, that although they were both equally sincere in their attachment to christianity, and both distinguished by [Page 223] noble intellectual exertions in the service of mankind, the critic was naturally disqualified from being a fair and a per­fect judge of the poet. My regard for a departed and me­ritorious writer (of great powers, but constitutionally un­happy) is such, that I would rather ascribe to any cause, than to mere envious malignity, his outrages against the poetical glory of Milton, which, from the force and celebrity of the very admirable but too austere work that contains them, it becomes the duty of a more recent biographer to expose.

For example, when Johnson says that Milton "wrote no language, but formed a Babylonish dialect, harsh and barbarous," though it would be difficult to pronounce a critical censure more bitter or more injurious, we may im­pute it, not to a malevolent desire of depreciating the poet, but to a natural want of ear for that harmony, which the critic condemns as discord. On this article, the most harmonious of our bards has been very happily vindicated by men of science and taste. Dr. Foster and Lord Mon­boddo have shewn Milton to be one of the most consummate artificers of language, that ever gave either energy or grace to words; and Mr. Loft, in the preface to his recent edition of Paradise Lost, describes the majestic flow of his numbers with such truth and eloquence, as render ample justice to the insulted dignity of the poet.

The insult, gross as it may be thought, loses much of its force when we recollect the inconsistency of the critic, who, though in his latter work he condemns the language of Milton as harsh and barbarous, had before observed, with [Page 224] more truth, in the Rambler, that the poet "excelled as much in the lower as in the higher parts of his art, and that his skill in harmony was not less than his invention or his learning;" but the praise as well as the censure of Johnson, on this article, could not be the result of perfect percep­tion, for the monotony of his own blank verse, and some of his remarks in the Rambler on particular lines of Milton, are striking proofs, that although he was a melodious writer himself in the common measures of rhyme, and in digni­fied prose, yet he never entered with perfect intelligence and feeling into the musical graces of Miltonic com­position; he was, indeed, as far from enjoying the poet's ear for the varied modulations and extensive compass of metrical harmony, as he was from possessing the mild elegance of his manners, or the cheerful elevation of his mind.

There is a striking resemblance between the poetical and the moral character of Milton; they were both the result of the finest dispositions for the attainment of excellence that nature could bestow, and of all the advantages that ar­dour and perseverance in study and discipline could add, in a long course of years, to the beneficent prodigality of nature: even in infancy he discovered a passion for glory; in youth he was attached to temperance; and, ar­riving at manhood, he formed the magnanimous design of building a lofty name upon the most solid and secure foundation.

In a noble consciousness of his powers and intentions, he was not afraid to give, in his early life, a most singular promise to his country of producing such future works as might redound to her glory; and though such personal ca­lamities fell upon him, as might fairly have absolved him from that engagement, yet never was any promise more mag­nificently fulfilled. Seneca has considered a man of reso­lution struggling with adversity as a spectacle worthy of God; our resolute countryman not only struggled with ad­versity, but, under a peculiar load of complicated cala­mities, he accomplished those works, that are justly reckoned among the noblest offspring of human genius. In this point of view, with what pathetic grandeur is the poet invested. In contemplating the variety of his sufferings, and his vari­ous mental atchievements, we may declare, without any ex­travagance of praise, that although sublimity is the predo­minant characteristic of Milton's poem, his own personal character is still more sublime.

His majestic pre-eminence is nobly described in the fol­lowing verses of Akenside, a poet who bore some affinity to Milton in the ardour of his mind, whose sentiments are always noble, though not always accompanied by a graceful felicity of expression.

The powers of Milton, indeed, are so irresistible, that even those, whom the blindness of prejudice has rendered his enemies, are constrained to regard him as an object of admiration. In this article posterity, to whom he made a very interesting appeal, has done him ample justice; still he is more admired than beloved; yet in granting him only ad­miration, we ungenerously withhold the richest half of that posthumous reward for which he laboured so fervently: we may be confident that he rather wished to excite the af­fection than the applause of mankind; and assuredly he has the noblest title to both, the title of having exerted super­lative genius and literary ambition, under the constant in­fluence of religious philanthropy. In proportion as our country has advanced in purity of taste, she has applauded the poet; and in proportion as she advances in liberality of sentiment, she will love the man; but love in this aspect is more volatile than admiration, and a beneficent genius may be easily deprived of it by the detraction of an enemy, or [Page 227] the mistake of a friend: Milton has suffered not a little from both; and indeed, if one singular mistake of his friends should prevail, he could hardly become an object of general affection. What votary of the Muses could love a poet, however excellent in that capacity, who represented it as a crime in a captive monarch to have made the poetry of Shakespeare the companion of his solitude? Credulity has imagined that Milton was such a barbarous Goth. Nor is this the suggestion of his enemies; even Warton, the liberal defender of his poetical reputation, and several living writers of eminence, have lavished their censures on Mil­ton, from a too hasty belief, that puritanical prejudices had hurried him into this rancorous absurdity.

Their censures are all founded on a mistake; but the merit of correcting it belongs not to me; Mr. Waldron, the sensible and modest editor of a miscellany, entitled, The Literary Museum, in a note to Roscius Anglicanus, has, in a very liberal manner, collected and refuted the charges against Milton on this point, and abundantly proved, that instead of censuring the unfortunate Charles for amusing himself with Shakespeare, he only censured him for imitat­ing the religious hypocrisy of Richard the Third so closely as to utter the very sentiments that are assigned to Richard in the page of the dramatic poet.

Milton undoubtedly thought, what an ardent political writer of the present age has not scrupled to assert, that "Charles the First lived and died an hypocrite." These two acute judges of mankind were, I believe, mistaken in this idea: it seems more probable, that this unfortunate [Page 228] prince was flattered into a persuasion, that he was really the meritorious martyr his adherents endeavoured to repre­sent him. But whatsoever his genuine character might be, the severe sentiments which Milton entertained of the king, and the delusive hopes that he cherished of the protector, had equally their source in the virtuous ardour of his own spirit. The consciousness of his integrity, when time had fully unveiled to him some illusions, gave that tranquillity and vigour to his declining days, which enabled him to pro­duce his astonishing poems, not more astonishing for their intrinsic merit, than for the period of their production; so that his poetry, in this point of view, may be regarded both as the offspring and the witness of his virtue. The world had ne­ver been enriched with his two poems on Paradise, if their great author, when he was, according to his own true and pathetic description, ‘In darkness and with dangers compass'd round,’ had not, in some little degree, resembled the hero of his latter poem, and like that hallowed personage, whom he delineates so divinely, amid the darkness and the fiends of the desert, ‘Sat unappall'd in calm and sinless peace.’

Yet to such misrepresentations has the life and the poetry of Milton been exposed, that both have been considered as too austere to be amiable, though assuredly, both in the one [Page 229] and the other, the most engaging qualities are admirably united to the most aweful—the graceful and the tender to the grand and the sublime.

The attractions of his muse have triumphed over oblo­quy, and in the estimation of the world she is justly thought to resemble the enchanting Eve of the poet,

But equal justice has not hitherto been rendered to the personal virtues of the author; it has, therefore, been my chief aim, in a delineation of his life, to make Milton rather more beloved than more admired; and I may the more reasonably hope to succeed in that idea, because, though I have never been attached to his political opinions, yet, in proportion to my researches into his character as a man, he has advanced in my esteem and my affection.

I lament that the necessity of investigating many misre­presentations, and of correcting much asperity against him, has frequently obliged me to speak rather in the tone of an advocate, than of a common biographer; but I may say, in the words of the great Roman author, pleading the cause of a poet infinitely less entitled to love and admiration; Hunc ego non diligam, non admirer, non omni ratione defenden­dum putem? Atque sic a summis hominibus cruditissimis­que accepimus, caeterarum rerum studia et doctrina, et prae­ceptis, et arte constare; poetam natura ipsa valere, et men­tis [Page 230] viribus excitari, et quasi divino quodam spiritu afflari—if poetical powers may ever deserve to be regarded as heavenly inspiration, such undoubtedly were those of Milton, and the use to which he applied them was worthy of the fountain whence they flowed. He is pre-eminent in that class of poets, very happily described in the two following verses by the amiable lord Falkland;

It is by the epic compositions of Milton alone that Eng­land may esteem herself as a rival to antiquity in the highest province of literature; and it appears therefore just, that the memory of the man, to whom she is indebted for the purest, the most extensive, and permanent glory, should for ever excite her affectionate veneration.