remains still untrodden,-the Talmudic Legends, with which he is known to have been familiar. Milton's acquaintance with Oriental literature was, for that age at least, very considerable. Why does not some adven

turous scholar follow his foot-prints among those writers? with much of extravagance, and much demanding a severer condemnation, they contain thoughts and images of no common beauty. In one place, for example, Adam is supposed by the newly-created light to survey at a single glance the universe around him. The sublime conception of the nature of the fallen angel may be found shadowed in the Talmudic picture of our first parent. In reading Milton, our admiration wavers between his invention and his learning. Ben Jonson, among the chief requisites for the formation of the poetical character, numbers the art of imitation; the faculty of converting the wealth of other writers to his own nutriment; not swallowing the substance in a crude and undigested mass, but extracting the choicest essence, and working the produce into one sweetness and savour. Thus a Virgil rises out of the tomb of Homer; the lip of Horace charms the Latin world upon the Grecian lute; and the Fairy Queen nourishes with her ambrosial milk a Cowley, a Pope, and a Thomson. Dryden's eulogy of Boileau, that he paid his obligations to the ancients with usury of his own in coin as good, and almost as universally valuable, applies to Milton with a deeper emphasis. He has himself told us, that Poetry is the art of expert judgment, and the final work of a head filled by long reading and observation, with elegant maxims and copious inventions. His practice corresponded with his theory. He discovered treasure in the most desolate soil; the East and the South paid him tribute; Athens and Vaucluse; Thebes

and Mantua. He drained the drowned lands of antiquity, and rescued jewels from the covetous sands*. A rich fancy, we have been told, resembles an Æolian harp in its sensitiveness to external influence, and the music of the tones depends upon the preparation of the strings +. Not poetry alone, but every intellectual production, must be the final work of a head stored with reading and reflection. Young, in his Epistle to Tickell, observed of the Spectator, that

A chance amusement polished half an age;

but the compliment was erroneous; Addison's previous collections occupied three folio volumes. In like manner, Gondibert grew up under the diligent hand of Davenant, and Hudibras was nurtured by the industry of Butler, and posterity was delighted with the erudite quaintnesses of Fuller. Sir Joshua Reynolds, enlarging upon the text of Milton, defines invention to consist in new combinations of images previously collected and deposited in the memory. Robert Hall said happily and truly of his friend, Sir James Mackintosh, that in him imagination was an acquisition rather than a faculty,that he had plenty of embellishments, at command, and that his mind was a spacious repository, full of beautiful images, from which he had only to make a selection; they were not manufactured, but imported. But Milton brought only the gold, and the gems; the shrine and the statue were of his own workmanship. His combinations are only so many new aspects of invention. What stream has not sparkled, or bower looked green, or bird poured out its music into verse; yet, in his page, the stream has a softer murmur, and the bower a richer verdure, and the

bird a more enchanting melody. Thus the sea of poetry contains in its remotest depths, caves never to be exhausted of the pearls which a mysterious and sleepless power is continually creating within its bosom. His mind was saturated with antiquity; from his early infancy he had been nourished with the milk of that better time. His dreams were of Italy or Greece. Arcadia opened her verdant solitudes before his feet; the nightingale sang to him at Colonos; Castaly flowed in upon his sleep; the voice of Plato,

Soft as when Zephyrus on Flora breathes,

resounded along the banks of the cool Ilissus; Demosthenes thundered from the Bema; Horace talked to him from his Sabine farm; and the summer moonlight glistened through the olives of the Academy.

His memory was of rare tenacity, retaining, even in declining age, its pristine vigour. The splendour of the grass, the glory of the flower, the beauty of the elements, were around him, and upon him, when his vision had been "blasted by excess of light," as vividly as in the morning of his youth. Flora came to cheer him, in his chamber hung with rusty green, with the same countenance of bloom and beauty that purpled the ground under the elms of Horton.

Dryden, by a strange obliquity of critical vision, considered Spenser's "ill choice of his stanza" a fault of the "second magnitude;" and thought him the more to be admired on account of the difficulties he overcame. It is a measure belonging to Fairy Land and Romance; uniting the fluency and amplitude of blank verse to the majestic harmony of the couplet, and surpassing both in its resounding march, and the imposing swell of its conclusion. Canning, in a letter to Walter Scott, pronounced

it the most artificial and magnificent metre that our language affords. All the charms of Nature, of Beauty, and of Love, find their echoes in it; the murmur of fountains, the rustling of leaves, the music of birds, the wailing of the lute, the whisper of affection, the sigh of tenderness, -who has uttered these like Spenser? But he never sounded his stanza to the bottom; employing it only as a mirror to reflect his placid conceptions of fair faces and enchanted gardens, he was, perhaps, unconscious of its bidden spells of sublimity, eloquence, and invective. It was reserved for a poet of our own time to open these mighty powers, and to task them to the uttermost. Beneath his hand, the line, no longer serene and unruffled, as it flowed from the lyre of Spenser, assumed a rhetorical force, and earnestness of passion; he put muscles into its delicate members, and caused every stanza to heave with a nervous vigour. It was Juvenal breathing fire into Virgil; South agitating the tranquil fancies of Bishop Hall. The heroic couplet, while in a great degree unaffected by the diffuseness natural to the Spenserian stanza, retains in the Elizabethan poets no inconsiderable share of its capacity; confining the sense within a narrower channel, and uttering the sentiment of the writer with a terser brevity. Hence it is peculiarly adapted to argument and philosophy, without impairing its susceptibility of the graces of description, the enthusiasm of passion, or the flashes of irony.

"If the poetry of Milton*," is the observation of Johnson, "be examined with regard to the pauses and flow of his verses into each other, it would appear that he has performed all that our language would admit; and the comparison of his numbers with those who have culti*In the Rambler.

vated the same manner of writing, will show that he 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." Lord Byron, indeed, imagined that the Paradise Lost might have been "more nobly conveyed to posterity" in the stanza of Spenser or Tasso, or the terza-rima of Dante, and he regretted that the Seasons had not been written in rhyme*.

Neither Johnson, nor any other of the poet's biographers, has noticed the progress of English versification. Dr. Nott, in the dissertation prefixed to his edition of the Remains of Surrey, seems to have established three points respecting our versification, as settled by Chaucer; first, that it was decasyllabic; secondly, that it was rhythmical; thirdly, that, like the old Alexandrine system, it admitted of redundant and defective lines. He carries his investigation rapidly over the intermediate productions of Hoccleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Barclay, and Skelton, to the appearance of the Earl of Surrey, to whom we owe the introduction of HEROIC BLANK VERSE. Warton's conjecture, that he might have borrowed the invention from the Italia Liberata of Trissino, Dr. Nott refutes by an appeal to chronology. The translation of the second and

*The general scheme of his versification, it is observed by Mr. Guest, allows five accents and ten syllables to the verse; but as he never counted the lengthening syllable of the second section, and not always the lengthening syllable of the first, his verse has often eleven, and sometimes even twelve syllables,-an abrupt section was furnished with a foot of three syllables, the first section always, the second in all cases but those in which the first section had a lengthening syllable, which was counted in the verse. The rhythm

of Pope and Dryden differed from Milton's in three particulars. It always counted the lengthening syllable of the first section: it admitted three syllables only in the second foot of the abrupt section'; and it rejected the sectional pause.—A History of English Rhythms, v. ii. b. iii. c. vii.