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and without a finger-post: the highest objects together with all of their contemporaries, excepting appeared, with few exceptions, no higher or Shakspeare. more ornamental than bulrushes. We shall spend but little time in repeating all the passages where they occur, and it will be a great relief to us. Invention, energy, and grandeur of design, the three great requisites to constitute a great poet, and which no poet since Milton hath united, are wanting here. Call the design a grand one, if you will; you can not however call it his. Wherever there are thought, imagination, and energy, grace invariably follows; otherwise the colossus would be without its radiance, and we should sail by with wonder and astonishment, and gather no roses and gaze at no images on the sunny isle.

Southey. It is wonderful that Milton should praise the continence of Alexander as well as of Scipio. Few conquerors had leisure for more excesses, or indulged in greater, than Alexander. He was reserved on one remarkable occasion: we hear of only one. Scipio, a much better man, and temperate in all things, would have been detested, even in Rome, if he had committed that crime from which the forbearance is foolishly celebrated as his chief virtue.

Southey. Shakspeare, whom you not only prefer to every other poet, but think he contains more poetry and more wisdom than all the rest united, is surely less grand in his designs than several. Landor. To the eye. But Othello was loftier than the citadel of Troy; and what a Paradise fell before him! Let us descend; for from Othello we must descend, whatever road we take; let us look at Julius Cæsar. No man ever overcame such difficulties, or produced by his life and death such a change in the world we inhabit. But that also is a grand design which displays the interior workings of the world within us, and where we see the imperishable and unalterable passions depicted al fresco on a lofty dome. Our other dramatists painted only on the shambles, and represented what they found there; blood and garbage. We leave them a few paces behind 1s, and step over the gutter into the green-market. There are however men rising up among us endowed with exquisiteness of taste and intensity of thought. At no time have there been so many who write well in so many ways. Southey. Have you taken breath? and are you ready to go on with me?

Landor. More than ready, alert. For we see before us a longer continuation of good poetry than we shall find again throughout the whole poem, beginning at verse 155, and terminating at 224. In these however there are some bad verses, such as

Among daughters of men the fairest found,
And made him bow to the gods of his wives.

V. 180,

Cast wanton eyes on the daughters of men, is false grammar; "thou cast for thou castedst." I find the same fault where I am as much surprised to find it, in Shelley.

Thou lovest, but ne'er knew love's sad satiety. Shelley in his Cenci has overcome the greatest difficulty that ever was overcome in poetry, although he has not risen to the greatest elevation. He possesses less vigour than Byron, and less command of language than Keats; but I would rather have written his

"Music, when soft voices die,"

You will not refuse your approbation to another long passage beginning at verse 260, and ending at 300. But at the conclusion of them, where the devil says that "beauty stands in the admiration only of weak minds," he savours a little of the Puritan. Milton was sometimes angry with her, but never had she a more devoted or a more discerning admirer. For these forty good verses, you will pardon,

After forty days' fasting had remained.

Landor. Very much like the progress of Milton himself in this jejunery. I remember your description of the cookery in Portugal and Spain, which my own experience most bitterly confirmed: but I never met with a bonito " gris-ambersteamed." This certainly was reserved for the devil's own cookery. Our Saviour, I think, might have fasted another forty days before he could have stomached this dainty; and the devil, if he had had his wits about him, might have known as much.

Southey. I have a verse in readiness which may serve as a napkin to it.

And with these words his temptation pursued, where it would have been very easy to have rendered it less disagreeable to the ear by a transposition.

And his temptation with these words pursued.

I am afraid you will object to a redundant heaviness in,

Get riches first.. get wealth.. and treasure heap; and no authority will reconcile you to roll-calls of proper names, such as

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To him who wears the regal diadem

is quite superfluous, and adds nothing to the harmony. Verses 472, 473, 474, 475, and 476, have the same cesura. This, I believe, has never been remarked, and yet is the most remarkable thing in all Milton's poetry.

It is wonderful that any critic should be so than all that Beaumont and Fletcher ever wrote, stupid as a dozen or two of them have proved

themselves to be, in applying the last verses of | for himself. The young man modestly and this second book to Christina of Sweden.

To give a kingdom hath been thought
Greater and nobler done, and to lay down
Far more magnanimous, than to assume.
Riches are needless then, &c.

Whether he had written this before or after the
abdication of Richard Cromwell, they are equally
applicable to him. He did retire not only from
sovranty but from riches. Christina took with
her to Rome prodigious wealth, and impoverished
Sweden by the pension she exacted.

The last lines are intolerably harsh :

Oftest better miss'd.

It may have been written "often:" a great relief to the ear, and no detriment to the sense or expression. We never noticed his care in avoiding such a ruggedness in verse 401,

timidly thanked him for his goodness, and entreated his lordship to exercise his own discre tion. With a volley of oaths, of which he was at all times prodigal, but more especially in the presence of a clergyman, he cried aloud, "Put this pen, sir, at the side of one or other." Hesitation was now impossible. The candidate placed it without looking where it happened to be at a benefice of small value. Thurlow slapped his hand upon the table, and roared, "By God, you were within an ace of the best living in my gift."

Landor. Hear the end.

His daughter, sought by many prowest knights, Both Paynim and the peers of Charlemagne. Southey. It would be difficult to extract, even from this poem, so many schoolboy's verses togeWhose pains have earn'd the far-fet spoil. ther. The preceding, which also are verbose, are He employed "far-fet" instead of "far-fetch'd," much more spirited, and the illustration of one not only because the latter is in conversational force by the display of another, and which the use, but because no sound is harsher than poet tells us is less, exhibits but small dis"fetch'd;" and especially before two sequent crimination in the critic who extols it. To praise consonants, followed by such words as "with a fault is worse than to commit one. I know not that." It is curious that he did not prefer "wherewith;" both because a verse ending in "that" followed by one ending in " quite," and because "that" also begins the next. I doubt whether you will be satisfied with the first verse I have marked in the third book,

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whether any such critic has pointed out for admiration the "glass of telescope," by which the Tempter might have shown Rome to our Saviour, v. 42, Book 4. But we must not pass over lines nearer the commencement, v. 10.

But as a man who had been matchless held

In cunning, over-reach'd where least he thought,
To salve his credit, and for very spite

Still will be tempting him who foils him still.

This is no simily, no illustration, but exactly what
Satan had been doing.

Landor. The Devil grows very dry in the desert, where he discourses

Of Academicks old and new, with those
Surnamed Peripateticks, and the sect
Epicurean, and the Stoick severe.

Southey. It is piteous to find the simplicity of the Gospel overlaid and deformed by the scholastic argumentation of our Saviour, and by the pleasure he appears to take in holding a long conversation with the Adversary.

Not therefore am I short

Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp, When Agrican with all his northern powers Besieged Albracca, as romances tell, The city of Gallafron, from whence to win The fairest of her sex, Angelica. Southey. How very like Addison, when his milk was turned to whey. I wish I could believe that the applauders of this poem were sincere, since it is impossible to think them judicious; their quotations, and especially Hallam's, having been selected from several of the weakest parts when better were close before them; but we have strong evidence that the opinion was given in the spirit of contradiction, and from the habit of hostility to what is eminent. I would be charitable: Hallam may have hit upon the place by hazard he may have been in the situation of a lowering; when he adds, : young candidate for preferment in the church, who was recommended to the Chancellor Thurlow. After much contemptuousness and ferocity, the chancellor throwing open on the table his Book of Livings, commanded him to choose

Of knowing what I ought. He who receives Light from above, from the fountain of light. What a verse v. 287, &c.! A dissertation from our Saviour, delivered to the Devil in the manner our poet has delivered it, was the only thing wanting to his punishment; and he catches it at last. V. 396.

Darkness now rose

As daylight sunk, and brought in lowering night,
Her shadowy offspring.

This is equally bad poetry and bad philosophy:
the Darkness rising and bringing in the Night

Unsubstantial both,

Privation mere of light.. and absent day. How! privation of its absence? He wipes away with a single stroke of the brush two very indistinct and ill-drawn figures.

Landor.

Our Saviour meek and with untroubled mind, After his airy jaunt, tho' hurried sore, How "hurried sore," if with untroubled mind? Hungry and cold, betook him to his rest.

purpose to substitute their lord. But by what ingenuity can we erect into a verse v. 597 ?

In the bosom of bliss and light of light.

In 613 and 614 we find rhyme.

I should have been quite satisfied with a quarter voices since they left Paradise.

of this.

Darkness now rose;

Our Saviour meek betook him to his rest. Such simplicity would be the more grateful and the more effective in preceding that part of Paradise Regained which is the most sublimely pathetic. It would be idle to remark the propriety of accentuation on concourse, and almost as idle to notice that in verse 420 is

Thou only stoodst unshaken;

and in v. 425,

Thou satst unappalled.

But to stand, as I said before, is to remain, or to be, in Milton, following the Italian. Never was the eloquence of poetry so set forth by words and numbers in any language as in this period. Pardon the infernal and hellish.

Infernal ghosts and hellish furies round

Landor. The angels seem to have lost their Their denunciations against Satan are very angry, but very weak.

Thee and thy legions; yelling they shall fly
And beg to hide them in a herd of swine,
Lest he command them down into the deep,
Bound, and to torment sent before their time.

Surely they had been tormented long before.

The close of the poem is extremely languid, however much it has been commended for its simplicity. Southey.

He, unobserved,

Home, to his mother's house, private return'd. Unobserved and private; home and his "mother's house," are not very distinctive.

Landor. Milton took but little time in forming the plan of his Paradise Regained, doubtful and hesitating as he had been in the construction of Paradise Lost. In composing a poem or any

Environ'd thee: some howl'd, some yell'd, some shriekt, other work of imagination, although it may be

Some bent at thee their fiery darts, while thou
Satst unappalled in calm and sinless peace.

The idea of sitting is in itself more beautiful than of standing or lying down, but our Saviour is represented as lying down, while

The tempter watcht, and soon with ugly dreams
Disturbed his sleep.

he could disturb, but not appall him, as he himself says in verse 487.

Southey. It is thought by Joseph Warton and some others, that, where the Devil says,

Then hear, O Son of David, virgin-born,
For Son of God to me is yet in doubt, &c.

he speaks sarcastically in the word virgin-born. But the Devil is not so bad a rhetorician as to turn round so suddenly from the ironical to the serious. He acknowledges the miracle of the Nativity; he pretends to doubt its Divinity.

So saying he caught him up, and without wing Of hippogrif, bore through the air sublime. Satan had given good proof that his wing was more than a match for a hippogrif's; and if he had borrowed a hippogrif's for the occasion, he could have made no use of it, unless he had borrowed the hippogrif too, and rode before or behind on him,

Over the wilderness.. and o'er the plain.
Two better verses follow; but the temple
Jerusalem could never have appeared

Topt with golden spires.

So Satan fell; and straight a fiery globe
Of angels on full sail of wing flew nigh,
Who on their plumy vans received him soft.

of

He means our Saviour, not Satan. In any ancient we should manage a little the ductus literarum, and, for the wretched words, "him soft,"

well and proper to lay down a plan, I doubt whether any author of any durable work has confined himself to it very strictly. But writers will no more tell you whether they do or not, than they will bring out before you the foul copies, or than painters will admit you into the secret of composing or of laying on their colours. I confess to you that a few detached thoughts and images have always been the beginnings of my works. Narrow slips have risen up, more or fewer, above the surface. These gradually became larger and more consolidated: freshness and verdure first covered one part, then another; then plants of firmer and of higher growth, however scantily, took their places, then extended their roots and branches; and among them and round about them in a little while you yourself, and as many more as I desired, found places for study and for recreation.

Returning to Paradise Regained. If a loop in the netting of a purse is let down, it loses the money that is in it; so a poem by laxity drops the weight of its contents. In the animal body, not only nerves and juices are necessary, but also continuity and cohesion. Milton is caught sleeping after his exertions in Paradise Lost, and the lock of his strength is shorn off; but here and there a pro

minent muscle swells out from the vast mass of the collapsed.

Southey. The Samson Agonistes, now before us, is less languid, but it may be charged with almost the heaviest fault of a poem, or indeed of any composition, particularly the dramatic, which is, there is insufficient coherency, or dependence of part on part. Let us not complain that, while we look at Samson and hear his voice, we are forced to think of Milton, of his blindness, of his abandonment, with as deep a commiseration. If we lay open the

Landor. I do; but I should be reluctant to see disturbed the order and course of things, by alterations at present unnecessary, or by attempts at what might be impracticable. When an evil can no longer be borne manfully and honestly and decorously, then down with it, and put something better in its place. Meanwhile guard strenuously against such evil. The vigilant will seldom be constrained to vengeance.

Such is

few faults covered by his transcendant excellen- | a peace or treaty, kings bestow on diplomatists. cies, we feel confident that none are more willing Whenever I read a French alexandrine, I fancy (or would be more acceptable were he present) to I receive a box on the ear in the middle of it, and pay him homage. I retain all my admiration another at the end, sufficient, if not to pain, to of his poetry; you all yours, not only of his weary me intolerably, and to make the book drop poetry, but of his sentiments on many grave out of my hand. Molière and La Fontaine can subjects. alone by their homœopathy revive me. the power of united wit and wisdom, in ages the most desperate! These men, with Montaigne and Charron, will survive existing customs, and probably existing creeds. Millions will be captivated by them, when the eloquence of Bossuet himself shall interest extremely few. Yet the charms of language are less liable to be dissipated by time than the sentences of wisdom. While the incondite volumes of more profound philosophers are no longer in existence, scarcely one of writers who enjoyed in a high degree the gift of eloquence, is altogether lost. Among the Athenians there are indeed some, but in general they were worthless men, squabbling on worthless matters: we have little to regret, excepting of Phocion and of Pericles. If we turn to Rome, we retain all the best of Cicero; and we patiently and almost indifferently hear that nothing is to be found of Marcus Antonius or Hortensius; for the eloquence of the bar is, and ought always to be, secondary.

Southey. Simple as is the plan of this drama, there are prettinesses in it which would be far from ornamental anywhere., Milton is much more exuberant in them than Ovid himself, who certainly would never have been so commended by Quinctilian for the Medea, had he written

Where I, a prisoner chain'd, scarce freely draw
The air imprisoned also. V.7.

But into what sublimity he soon ascends!
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

Landor. My copy is printed as you read it; but there ought to be commas after eyeless, after Gaza, and after mill. Generally our printers or writers put three commas where one would do; but here the grief of Samson is aggravated at every member of the sentence. Surely it must

have been the resolution of Milton to render his

choruses as inharmonious as he fancied the Greek were, or would be, without the accompaniments of

instrument, accentuation, and chaunts; otherwise how can we account for "abandoned, and by himself given over; in slavish habit, ill-fitted weeds, over-worn and soiled. Or do my eyes misrepresent? Can this be he, that heroic, that renowned,

irresistible Samson!"

Southey. We are soon compensated, regretting only that the chorus talks of "Chalybian tempered steel" in the beginning, and then informs us of his exploit with the jaw-bone,

In Ramath-lechi, famous to this day.

It would be strange indeed if such a victory as was never won before, were forgotten in twenty years, or thereabout.

Southey. Passing Milton's oversights, we next notice his systematic defects. Fondness for Euripides made him too didactic when action was required. Perhaps the French drama kept him in countenance, although he seems to have paid little attention to it, comparatively.

Landor. The French drama contains some of the finest didactic poetry in the world, and is peculiarly adapted both to direct the reason and to control the passions. It is a well-lighted saloon of graceful eloquence, where the sword-knot is appended by the hand of Beauty, and where the snuff-box is composed of such brilliants as, after

paid little attention to the French drama. InSouthey. You were remarking that our poet deed in his preface he takes no notice of it whatsoever, not even as regards the plot, in which consists its chief excellence, or perhaps I should say rather its superiority. He holds the opinion that " a plot, whether intricate or explicit, is nothing but such economy or disposition of the fable, as may stand best with verisimilitude and decorum." Surely the French tragedians have observed this doctrine attentively.

events have followed one another in their natural Landor. It has rarely happened that dramatic order. The most remarkable instance of it is in the King Edipus of Sophocles. But Racine is

little energy and less invention. I wish Milton in general the most skilful of the tragedians, with had abstained from calling." Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the three tragic poets unequalled yet by any;" because it may leave a suspicion that he fancied he, essentially undramatic, could equal them, and had now done it; and because it exhibits him as a detractor from Shakspeare. I am as sorry to find him in this condition as I should have been to find him in a fit of the gout, or treading on a nail with naked foot in his blindness.

Southey. Unfortunately it is impossible to exculpate him; for you must have remarked where, a few sentences above, are these expressions. "This is mentioned to vindicate from the small esteem, or rather infamy, which in the account of many, it undergoes at this day, with other common interludes; happening through the poet's error of intermixing comick stuff with tragick sad ness and gravity, or intermixing trivial and vulgar persons, which, by all judicious, hath

been counted absurd, and brought in without | original plan in the detection of blemishes. Eyes discretion, corruptly to gratify the people."

Landor. It may be questioned whether the people in the reign of Elizabeth, or indeed the queen herself, would have been contented with a drama without a smack of the indecent or the ludicrous. They had alike been accustomed to scenes of ribaldry and of bloodshed; and the palace opened on one wing to the brothel, on the other to the shambles. The clowns of Shakspeare are still admired by not the vulgar only.

the least clear-sighted could easily perceive one in

For of such doctrine never was there school

But the heart of the fool.

And no man therein doctor but himself. V. 299.

They could discern here nothing but the quaint conceit; and it never occurred to them that the chorus knew nothing of schools and doctors. A line above, there is an expression not English. For "who believe not the existence of God,"

Who think not God at all. V. 295.

Southey. The more the pity. Let them appear And is it captious to say that, when Manoah's locks in their proper places. But a picture by Morland are called "white as down," whiteness is no or Frank Hals ought never to break a series of characteristic of down? Perhaps you will be profrescoes by the hand of Raphael, or of senatorial pitiated by the number of words in our days portraits animated by the sun of Titian. There is equally accented on the first syllable, which in much to be regretted in, and (since we are alone I this drama the great poet, with all his authority, will say it) a little which might without loss or has stamped on the second; such as impùlse, injury be rejected, from, the treasury of Shaks- edict, contràry, prescript, the substantive contèst, peare. instinct, crystalline, pretèxt.

Landor. It is difficult to sweep away anything and not to sweep away gold-dust with it! but viler dust lies thick in some places. The grave Milton too has cobwebs hanging on his workshop, which a high broom, in a steady hand, may reach without doing mischief. But let children and short men, and unwary ones, stand out of the

way.

66

Landor. I wish we had preserved them all in that good condition, excepting the substantive contest, which ought to follow the lead of conquest." But "now we have got to the worst, let us keep to the worst," is the sound conservative maxim of the day.

Southey. I perceive you adhere to your doctrine in the termination of Aristoteles.

Southey. Necessary warning! for nothing else occasions so general satisfaction as the triumph of a weak mind over a stronger. And this often happens; for the sutures of a giant's armour are most penetrable from below. Surely no poet is so deeply pathetic as the one before us, and nowhere more than in those verses which begin at the sixtieth and end with the eighty-fifth. There is much fine poetry after this; and perhaps the prolixity is very rational in a man so afflicted, but the composition is the worse for it. Samson could have known nothing of the interlunar cave; nor could he ever have thought about the light of the soul, and of the soul being all in every part. Landor. Reminiscences of many sad afflictions There is great eloquence and pathos in the speech have already burst upon the poet, but instead of overwhelming him, they have endued him with scorpion's tail behind," in redoubled might and majesty. Verses worthier V. 360, is inapposite. Perhaps my remark is unof a sovran poet, sentiments worthier of a pure, worthy of your notice; but, as you are reading indomitable, inflexible, republican, never issued on, you seem to ponder on something which is from the human heart, than these referring to worthy. the army, in the last effort made to rescue the English nation from disgrace and servitude.

Landor. If we were to say Aristotle, why not Themistocle, Empedocle, and Pericle? Here, too, neath has always a hyphen before it, quite unnecessarily. From neath comes nether, which reminds me that it would be better spelt, as it was formerly, nethe.

But go on we can do no good yet.
Southey.

That invincible Samson, far renowned. V.341.
Here, unless we place the accent on the third
syllable, the verse assumes another form, and such
as is used only in the ludicrous or light poetry,
scanned thus;

Had Judah that day joined, or one whole tribe,
They had by this possest the towers of Gath,
And lorded over them whom now they serve.
But what more oft, in nations grown corrupt
And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love bondage more than liberty,
Bondage with ease than strenuous liberty,
And to despise or envy or suspect
Whom God hath of his special favour rais'd
As their deliverer! If he ought begin,
How frequent to desert him! and at last
To heap ingratitude on worthiest deeds!

Southey. I shall be sorry to damp your enthusiasm, in however slight a degree, by pursuing our

VOL. II.

That invincible Sam | son, &c.

of Manoah: but the "

Landor. How very much would literature have lost, if this marvellously great and admirable man had omitted the various references to himself and his contemporaries. He had grown calmer at the close of life, and saw in Cromwell as a fault what he had seen before as a necessity or a virtue. The indignities offered to the sepulchre and remains of the greatest of English sovrans by the most ignominious, made the tears of Milton gush from his darkened eyes, and extorted from his generous and grateful heart this exclamation:

Alas! methinks when God hath chosen one
To worthiest deeds, if he through frailty err
He should not so o'erwhelm, and as a thrall
Subject him to so foul indignities,

Be it but for honour's sake of former deeds.

M

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