Into this great chef-d'œuvre of Milton it was no doubt Johnson's secret determination to send a telling shot at parting. He would lodge a little gage d'amitié, a farewell pledge of hatred, a trifling token (trifling, but such things are not estimated in money) of his eternal malice. Milton's admirers might divide it among themselves; and, if it should happen to fester and rankle in their hearts, so much the better; they were heartily welcome to the poison: not a jot would he deduct for himself if a thousand times greater. O Sam! kill us not with munificence. But now, as I must close within a minute or so, what is that pretty souvenir of gracious detestation with which our friend took his leave? The Paradise Lost, said he, in effect, is a wonderful work; wonderful; grand beyond all estimate; sublime to a fault. But-well, go on; we are all listening. But I grieve to say it, wearisome. It creates a world of admiration (one world, take notice); but-oh, that I, senior offshoot from the house of Malagrowthers, should live to say it !—ten worlds of ennui: one world of astonishment; ten worlds of tædium vitæ. Half and half might be tolerated-it is often tolerated by the bibulous and others; but one against ten? No, no!

This, then, was the farewell blessing which Dr. Johnson bestowed upon the Paradise Lost! What is my reply? The poem, it seems, is wearisome; Edmund Waller called it dull. A man, it is alleged by Dr. Johnson, opens the volume; reads a page or two with feelings allied to awe next he finds pass being so much narrower in the Paradise Regained, if no other reason operated, inevitably the splendours are sown more thinly. But the great vision of the temptation, the banquet in the wilderness, the wilderness itself, the terrific pathos of the ruined archangel's speech-'Tis true I am that spirit unfortunate, &c. (the effect of which, when connected with the stern unpitying answer, is painfully to shock the reader), all these proclaim the ancient skill and the ancient power. And, as regards the skill naturally brightened by long practice, that succession of great friezes which the archangel unrolls in the pictures of Athens, Rome, and Parthia, besides their native and intrinsic beauty, have an unrivalled beauty of position through the reflex illustration which reciprocally they give and receive. [Milton did not express any preference of his own for Paradise Regained over Paradise Lost, but only dissatisfaction with the opinion, reported to him as general, that Paradise Regained was a great falling off from Paradise Lost. The fact comes to us from his nephew, Edward Phillips.-M.]

himself rather jaded; then sleepy; naturally shuts up the book; and forgets ever to take it down again. Now, when

any work of human art is impeached as wearisome, the first reply is wearisome to whom? For it so happens that nothing exists, absolutely nothing, which is not at some time, and to some person, wearisome or even potentially disgusting. There is no exception for the works of God. "Man delights

:

not me, nor woman either," is the sigh which breathes from the morbid misanthropy of the gloomy but philosophic Hamlet. Weariness, moreover, and even sleepiness, is the natural reaction of awe or of feelings too highly strung; and this reaction in some degree proves the sincerity of the previous awe. In cases of that class, where the impressions of sympathetic veneration have been really unaffected, but carried too far, the mistake is to have read too much at a time. But these are exceptional cases: to the great majority of readers the poem is wearisome through mere vulgarity and helpless imbecility of mind; not from overstrained excitement, but from pure defect in the capacity for excitement. And a moment's reflection at this point lays bare to us the malignity of Dr. Johnson. The logic of that malignity is simply this that he applies to Milton, as if separately and specially true of him, a rule abstracted from human experience spread over the total field of civilisation. All nations are here on a level. Not a hundredth part of their populations is capable of any unaffected sympathy with what is truly great in sculpture, in painting, in music, and by a transcendent necessity in the supreme of Fine Arts-Poetry. To be popular in any but a meagre comparative sense as an artist of whatsoever class is to be confessedly a condescender to human infirmities. And, as to the test which Dr. Johnson, by inplication, proposes as trying the merits of Milton in his greatest work, viz. the degree in which it was read, the Doctor knew pretty well,-and when by accident he did not was inexcusable for neglecting to inquire,—that by the same test all the great classical works of past ages, Pagan or Christian, might be branded with the mark of suspicion as works that had failed of their paramount purpose, viz. a deep control over the modes of thinking and feeling in each successive generation. Were it not for the continued succession

of academic students having a contingent mercenary interest in many of the great authors surviving from the wrecks of time, scarcely one edition of fresh copies would be called for in each period of fifty years. And, as to the arts of sculpture and painting, were the great monuments in the former art, those, I mean, inherited from Greece, such as the groups, &c., scattered through Italian mansions, the Venus, the Apollo, the Hercules, the Faun, the Gladiator, and the marbles in the British Museum, purchased by the Government from the late Lord Elgin,-stripped of their metropolitan advantages, and left to their own unaided attraction in some provincial town, they would not avail to keep the requisite officers of any establishment for housing them in salt and tobacco. We may judge of this by the records left behind by Benjamin Haydon of the difficulty which he found in simply upholding their value as wrecks of the Phidian æra. The same law asserts itself everywhere. What is ideally grand lies beyond the region of ordinary 1 human sympathies ; which must, by a mere instinct of good sense, seek out objects more congenial and upon their own level. One answer to Johnson's killing shot, as he kindly meant it, is

1 In candour I must add--if uncultured. This will suggest a great addition to the one in a hundred whom I have supposed capable of sympathy with the higher class of models. For the majority of men have had no advantages, no training, no discipline. How extravagantly unjust, therefore, in the same Benjamin Haydon, whom I have just cited as a witness on my side, when he furiously denounces the mob of mechanics and day-labourers in London rushing carelessly past the exhibition room of a great painting by himself, and paying their sixpences by bushels to see Tom Thumb. I have seen Haydon's ignoble and most unjust complaint echoed by multitudes. But this was a mob of pleasure-seekers in Easter week: poor fellows, with horny hands, in quest most rightfully of something to refresh and ventilate their bodily systems, scorched by the eternal fever of unresting days and nights agitated by care. Anything on earth, anything whatever that would unchain the poor galley-slave's wrists from his everlasting oar! And, as to the oil-painting, surely the fields and the Easter flowers would be better than that. Haydon forgot that these poor fellows had never had their natural sensibilities called forth or educated. Amongst them, after all, might lurk a man or two that, having such advantages, would have eclipsed even Haydon. And, besides, Haydon forgot that his exhibition not only cost a shilling, but would not allow of any uproarious jollification, such as most of us like (none more than Haydon) after a long confinement to labour.

that our brother is not dead but sleeping. Regularly as the coming generations unfold their vast processions, regularly as these processions move forward upon the impulse and summons of a nobler music, regularly as the dormant powers and sensibilities of the intellect in the working man are more and more developed, the Paradise Lost will be called for more and more: less and less continually will there be any reason to complain that the immortal book, being once restored to its place, is left to slumber for a generation. So far as regards the Time which is coming; but Dr. Johnson's insulting farewell was an arrow feathered to meet the Past and Present. We may be glad at any rate that the supposed neglect is not a wrong which Milton does, but which Milton suffers. Yet that Dr. Johnson should have pretended to think the case in any special way affecting the reputation or latent powers of Milton,-Dr. Johnson, that knew the fates of Books, and had seen by moonlight, in the Bodleian, the ghostly array of innumerable books long since departed as regards all human interest or knowledge-a review like that in Béranger's Dream of the First Napoleon at St. Helena, reviewing the buried forms from Austerlitz or Borodino, horses and men, trumpets and eagles, all phantom delusions, vanishing as the eternal dawn returned, might have seemed incredible except to one who knew the immortality of malice,-that for a moment Dr. Johnson supposed himself seated on the tribunal in the character of judge, and that Milton was in fancy placed before him at the bar,

"Quem si non aliquâ nocuisset, mortuus esset."

RICHARD BENTLEY 1

PART I

MANY years ago, walking in the sequestered valleys of Cumberland with an eminent author 2 of the present day, we came to a long and desolate sort of gallery, through a wilderness of rocks, which, after rising and narrowing for about two miles, suddenly opened right and left into a little pastoral recess, within the very heart of the highest mountains. This verdant circus presented in its centre a beautiful but tiny lake, locally called a tarn,3 with a wild brook issuing from it

1 This long and scholarly paper, the most elaborate of all De Quincey's efforts of the strictly biographical kind, and a really important contribution to English biographical literature, appeared originally in the form of two successive articles in Blackwood's Magazine for September and October 1830, in the guise of a review of a "Life of Richard Bentley, D.D., by J. H. Monk, D.D.," then just published. Dr. Monk was soon afterwards Bishop of Gloucester. De Quincey revised the paper in 1857 for vol. vii. of his collected writings, as usual making some changes. These consist chiefly of added sentences and footnotes.-M.

2 "Eminent author" :-Viz. who? On second thoughts, there is no call for secrecy; and therefore, in this third edition, I abjure it. The eminent author was Robert Southey; the beautiful but litigious solitude (a valley to which the only road, far from descending, as in making for a valley it should have done, slowly ascended for miles) was Watenlath, six miles from Keswick, and three from the foot of Lodore Waterfall.

3 "Tarn":-Any small lake among mountains much above the level of the larger lakes, and fed, not (as they are) by one main stream, but by a number of petty rills trickling down the side of the surround