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the melancholy temper, or upon the same man as he is differently disposed; but rather how, among the successive variety of appearances, every disposition of mind takes hold on those by which it may be gratified.

The chearful man hears the lark in the morning; the pensive man hears the nightingale in the evening. The chearful man sees the cock strut, and hears the horn and hounds echo in the wood; then walks 'not unseen' to observe the glory of the rising sun or listen to the singing milk-maid, and view the labours of the plowman and the mower; then casts his eyes about him over scenes of smiling plenty, and looks up to the distant tower, the residence of some fair inhabitant: thus he pursues rural gaiety through a day of labour or of play, and delights himself at night with the fanciful narratives of superstitious ignorance.

The pensive man at one time walks 'unseen?' to muse at midnight, and at another hears the sullen curfew. If the weather drives him home he sits in a room lighted only by 'glowing embers 3'; or by a lonely lamp outwatches the North Star to discover the habitation of separate souls, and varies the shades of meditation by contemplating the magnificent or pathetick scenes of tragick and epick poetry. When the morning comes, a morning gloomy with rain and wind, he walks into the dark trackless woods, falls asleep by some murmuring water, and with melancholy enthusiasm expects some dream of prognostication or some musick played by aerial performers.

Both Mirth and Melancholy are solitary, silent inhabitants of the breast that neither receive nor transmit communication; no mention is therefore made of a philosophical friend or a pleasant companion. The seriousness does not arise from any participation of calamity, nor the gaiety 5 from the pleasures of the bottle.

The man of chearfulness having exhausted the country tries what towered cities' will afford, and mingles with scenes of

splendor, gay assemblies, and nuptial festivities; but he mingles a mere spectator as, when the learned comedies of Jonson or the wild dramas of Shakespeare are exhibited, he attends the theatre'. The pensive man never loses himself in crowds, but walks the 190 cloister or frequents the cathedral. Milton probably had not yet forsaken the Church.

Both his characters delight in musick; but he seems to think 191 that chearful notes would have obtained from Pluto a compleat dismission of Eurydice, of whom solemn sounds only procured a conditional release 2.

For the old age of Chearfulness he makes no provision; but 192 Melancholy he conducts with great dignity to the close of life. His Chearfulness is without levity, and his Pensiveness without asperity 3.

Through these two poems the images are properly selected 193 and nicely distinguished, but the colours of the diction seem not sufficiently discriminated. I know not whether the characters are kept sufficiently apart. No mirth can, indeed, be found in his melancholy; but I am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth. They are two noble efforts of imagination.

The greatest of his juvenile performances is the Mask of Comus1, 194 in which may very plainly be discovered the dawn or twilight of Paradise Lost 5. Milton appears to have formed very early that system of diction and mode of verse which his maturer judgement approved, and from which he never endeavoured nor desired to deviate.

Nor does Comus. afford only a specimen of his language: it 195 exhibits likewise his power of description and his vigour of sentiment, employed in the praise and defence of virtue. A

work more truly poetical is rarely found; allusions, images, and descriptive epithets embellish almost every period with lavish decoration. As a series of lines, therefore, it may be considered as worthy of all the admiration with which the votaries have received it.

196As a drama it is deficient. The action is not probable. A Masque, in those parts where supernatural intervention is admitted, must indeed be given up to all the freaks of imagination; but so far as the action is merely human it ought to be reasonable, which can hardly be said of the conduct of the two brothers, who, when their sister sinks with fatigue in a pathless wilderness, wander both away in search of berries too far to find their way back, and leave a helpless Lady to all the sadness and danger of solitude. This however is a defect over-balanced by its convenience.

197 What deserves more reprehension is that the prologue spoken in the wild wood by the attendant Spirit is addressed to the audience; a mode of communication so contrary to the nature of dramatick representation that no precedents can support it 1.

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The discourse of the Spirit is too long, an objection that may be made to almost all the following speeches; they have not the spriteliness of a dialogue animated by reciprocal contention, but seem rather declamations deliberately composed and formally repeated on a moral question. The auditor therefore listens as to a lecture, without passion, without anxiety 2.

The song of Comus has airiness and jolity3; but, what may recommend Milton's morals as well as his poetry, the invitations to pleasure are so general that they excite no distinct images of corrupt enjoyment, and take no dangerous hold on the fancy. 200 The following soliloquies of Comus and the Lady are elegant, but tedious. 4 The song must owe much to the voice, if it ever can delight. At last the Brothers enter, with too much tranquillity; and when they have feared lest their sister should be in danger, and hoped that she is not in danger, the Elder makes a speech in praise of chastity 5, and the Younger finds how fine it is to be a philosopher 6.

Then descends the Spirit in form of a shepherd'; and the 201 Brother, instead of being in haste to ask his help, praises his singing, and enquires his business in that place. It is remarkable that at this interview the Brother is taken with a short fit of rhyming. The Spirit relates that the Lady is in the power of Comus, the Brother moralises again, and the Spirit makes a long narration, of no use because it is false, and therefore unsuitable to a good Being.

In all these parts the language is poetical and the sentiments 202 are generous, but there is something wanting to allure attention.

The dispute between the Lady and Comus3 is the most ani- 203 mated and affecting scene of the drama, and wants nothing but a brisker reciprocation of objections and replies, to invite attention and detain it.

The songs are vigorous and full of imagery; but they are 204 Karsh in their diction, and not very musical in their numbers.

Throughout the whole the figures are too bold and the language 205 too luxuriant for dialogue: it is a drama in the epick style, inelegantly splendid, and tediously instructive.

The Sonnets were written in different parts of Milton's life upon 206 different occasions. They deserve not any particular criticism; for of the best it can only be said that they are not bad, and perhaps only the eighth and the twenty-first are truly entitled to this slender commendation 5. The fabrick of a sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has never succeeded in ours,

I 1.490.

3 11. 659-813.

4

2 11. 495-512.

According to Dr. Warton there were at the end of the eighteenth century many who thought The Fairy Queen, Palamon and Arcite, The Tempest, and Comus 'childish and romantic.' Warton's Pope's Works, Preface, p. 55.

'Johnson must have lost all the senses that are affected by poetry when he calls the whole drama tediously instructive. There is, indeed, here and there prolixity; yet refreshing springs burst out profusely in every part of the wordy wilderness.' LANDOR, Imag. Conver. iv. 284.

Johnson admits that in all its parts it is truly poetical.' Ante, MILTON, 195.

Ante, MILTON, 55, 152.

'Milton's sonnets are in several places incorrect, and sometimes uncouth in language, and, perhaps, in some, inharmonious; yet, upon the whole, I think the music exceedingly well suited to its end; that is, it has an energetic and varied flow of sound crowding into narrow room more of the combined effect of rhyme and blank verse than can be done by any other kind of verse I know of.' WORDSWORTH, Memoirs, i. 287. 'and when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand [he blew The Thing became a trumpet, whence Soul-animating strains-alas too few!' WORDSWORTH, Poet. Works, ii. 309.

'A few of Milton's sonnets are extremely bad; the rest are excellent.' LANDOR, Imag. Conver. iv. 285.

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which, having greater variety of termination, requires the rhymes to be often changed.

Those little pieces may be dispatched without much anxiety; a greater work calls for greater care. I am now to examine Paradise Lost, a poem which, considered with respect to design, may claim the first place, and with respect to performance the second, among the productions of the human mind '.

208 By the general consent of criticks the first praise of genius is due to the writer of an epick poem, as it requires an assemblage of all the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions?. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason. Epick poetry undertakes to teach the most important truths by the most pleasing precepts, and therefore relates some great event in the most affecting manner. History must supply the writer with the rudiments of narration, which he must improve and exalt by a nobler art, must animate by dramatick energy, and diversify by retrospection and anticipation; morality must teach him the exact bounds and different shades of vice and virtue; from policy and the practice of life he has to learn the discriminations of character and the tendency of the passions, either single or combined; and physiology3 must supply him with illustrations and images. To put these materials to poetical use is required an imagination capable of painting nature and realizing fiction. Nor is he yet a poet till he has

Ante, MILTON, 109. 'The first place among our English poets is due to Milton.' ADDISON, The Spectator, No. 262. 'If Milton's Paradise Lost falls short of the Aeneid or Iliad in this respect [the arts of working on the imagination], it proceeds rather from the fault of the language in which it is written than from any defect of genius in the author.' lb. No. 417.

'I recur to the Paradise Lost incessantly as the noblest specimen in the world of eloquence, harmony and genius.' LANDOR, Imag. Conver. iv. 245.

Macaulay thought that 'Milton's fame would have stood higher if only the first four books had been preserved. He would then have been placed above Homer.' Trevelyan's Macaulay, ii. 200.

The most perfect work of poetry, says our master Aristotle, is tragedy [Poetics, xxvii. 15]. ... But... an heroick poem is certainly the greatest work of human nature.' DRYDEN, Works, xiii. 36. See also ib. xiv. 129.

Horace Walpole, perhaps in answer to Johnson, describes an epic poem as that most senseless of all the species of poetic compositions, and which pedants call the chef-d'œuvre of the human mind.... When nothing has been impossible to genius in every other walk, why has everybody failed in this but the inventor, Homer? Milton, all imagination, and a thousand times more sublime and spirited [than Virgil], has produced a monster.' Letters, viii. 235.