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succession of parts. Thus, for instance, "There was war in heaven," furnished the matter for a whole book. Now for the latter poem,—which part of our Saviour's life was it best to select as that in which Paradise was Regained? He might have taken the Crucifixion, and here he had a much wider field than in the Temptation; but then he was subject to this dilemma. If he modified, or in any way altered, the full details of the four Evangelists, he shocked the religious sense of all Christians; yet, the purposes of a poet would often require that he should so modify them. With a fine sense of this difficulty, he chose the narrow basis of the Temptation in the Wilderness, because there the whole had been wrapt up by Scripture in a few obscure abstractions. Thus, "He showed him all the kingdoms of the earth," is expanded, without offence to the nicest religious scruple, into that matchless succession of pictures, which bring before us the learned glories of Athens, Rome in her civil grandeur, and the barbaric splendour of Parthia. The actors being only two, the action of "Paradise Regained" is unavoidably limited. But in respect of composition, it is perhaps more elaborately finished than "Paradise Lost."

In 1672, he published in Latin a new scheme of Logic, on the method of Ramus, in which Dr. Johnson suspects him to have meditated the very eccentric crime of rebellion against the universities. Be that as it may, this little book is in one view not without interest; all scholastic systems of logic confound logic and metaphysics; and some of Milton's metaphysical doctrines, as the present Bishop of Winchester has noticed, have a reference to the doctrines brought forward in his posthumous Theology. The history of the last named work is remarkable. That such a

treatise had existed was well known, but it had disappeared and was supposed to be irrecoverably lost. Meantime, in the year 1823, a Latin manuscript was discovered in the State-Paper Office, under circumstances which leave little doubt of its being the identical work which Milton was known to have composed. By the king's command, it was edited by Mr. Sumner, the present Bishop of Winchester, and separately published in a translation.

What he published after the scheme of logic is not important enough to merit a separate notice. His end was now approaching. In the summer of 1674 he was still cheerful and in the possession of his intellectual faculties. But the vigour of his bodily constitution had been silently giving way, through a long course of years, to the ravages of gout. It was at length thoroughly undermined and about the 10th of November 1674 he died with tranquillity so profound, that his attendants were unable to determine the exact moment of his decease. He was buried, with unusual marks of honour, in the chancel of St. Giles', at Cripplegate.

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[The published lives of Milton are very numerous. Among

* This closing paragraph must (from internal evidence) have been added at the press, I presume, in or about the year 1830 or 1831, when the little sketch was written and probably printed. I have no wish or design to charge the unknown writer with any intentional falsification of my very determinate opinions upon the chief biographers of Milton. Bishop Newton and Archdeacon Todd, I believe to have been honest men, but brought unavoidably into positions trying to that honesty, and even into inextricable perplexities by the collision between two most solemn obligations,—viz., on the one hand loyalty to the Church of England, and on the other hand loyalty to the mighty poet whose intellectual interests they had spontaneously

the best and most copious are those prefixed to the editions of Milton's Works, by Bishop Newton, secondly by Todd, and thirdly by Symmons. An article of considerable length,

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engaged to sustain, though well knowing that this great man had ranked as the most undistinguishing, fierce, and sometimes even malicious (though still conscientious) assailant that ever tilted against the splendid Anglican Establishment. Dutiful sons (being at the same time beneficed servants) of that Establishment could not effectually mediate between interests so radically opposed. Would it indeed be fair to expect from one who had simply promised us a biographic sketch of an individual, that amongst the mere collateral issues emerging as questions incidentally connected with his theme, he should, for instance, exhaust the great problem of Church Government; whether best administered by Prelates arrayed in purple and gold, or by obscure and dust-begrimed Elders, or (in defiance of all alien authority) administered Independently—i. e., by each congregation separately for itself; in which case each congregation is perfect church hanging by its own hook, and owning no debt, great or small, to any brother congregation, except only that of an exemplary kicking in case such brother should presume to interfere with advice not asked for, or with impertinent suggestion. Newton and Todd extricated themselves with decency from a difficulty which it was impossible to face with absolute success; and the main impression left upon my mind to their disadvantage is-that their materials were chaotic, difficult to organize without the powers of a demiurgus, and accordingly not organized. As to Symmons, he was a Whig; and his covert purpose was to secure Milton for his own party, before that party was fully secreted by the new tendencies beginning to move amongst the partisanships of the age. Until Dr. Sacheverel came, in Queen Anne's reign, the crystallizations of Whig and Tory were rudimental and incomplete. Symmons, therefore, was under a bias and a morbid kind of deflexion. He was, besides, tumultuary and precipitate in his modes of composition. Finally, as regards Dr. Johnson, am I the man that would suffer him to escape under the trivial impeachment of "prejudice?" Dr. Johnson, viewed in relation to Milton, was a malicious, mendacious, and dishonest man. He was met by temptations many and strong to falsehood; and thesǝ temptations he had not the virtue to resist,

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founded upon the latter, will be found in Rees's Cyclopædia. But the most remarkable is that written by Dr. Johnson in his Lives of the British Poets; a production grievously disfigured by prejudice, yet well deserving the student's attention, for its intrinsic merits, as well as for the celebrity which it has attained.]

THE REVOLUTION OF GREECE.

Ir is falsely charged upon itself by this age, in its character of censor morum, that effeminacy in a practical sense lies either amongst its full-blown faults, or amongst its lurking tendencies. A rich, a polished, a refined age, may, by mere necessity of inference, be presumed to be a luxurious one; and the usual principle which sets in motion the whole trivial philosophy which speculates upon the character of a particular age or a particular nation, is first of all to adopt some one central idea of its characteristics, and then without further effort to pursue its integration; that is, having assumed (or, suppose even having demonstrated) the existence of some great influential quality in excess sufficient to overthrow the apparent equilibrium demanded by the common standards of a just national character, the speculator then proceeds, as in a matter of acknowledged right, to push this predominant quality into all its consequences, and all its closest affinities. To give one illustration of such a case, now perhaps beginning to be forgotten: Somewhere about the year 1755, the once celebrated Dr. Brown, after other little attempts in literature and paradox, took up the conceit that England was ruined at her heart's core by excess of luxury and sensual self-indulgence. He had persuaded himself that the ancient activities and energies of

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