This is undoubtedly a just and regular catastrophe, and the poem, therefore, has a beginning and an end which Aristotle himself could not have disapproved; but it must be allowed to want a middle, since nothing passes between the first act and the last, that either hastens or delays the death of Samson. The whole drama, if its superfluities were cut off, would scarcely fill a single act; yet this is the tragedy which ignorance has admired, and bigotry applauded.

NUMB. 140. SATURDAY, July 20, 1751.

-Quis tam Lucili fautor inepte est,

Ut non hoc fateatur.

What doating bigot, to his faults so blind,
As not to grant me this, can Milton find?

HOR.

It is common, says Bacon, to desire the end without enduring the means. Every member of society feels and acknowledges the necessity of detecting crimes, yet scarce any degree of virtue or reputation is able to secure an informer from publick hatred. The learned world has always admitted the usefulness of critical disquisitions, yet he that attempts to show, however modestly, the failures of a celebrated writer, shall surely irritate his admirers, and incur the imputation of envy, captiousness, and malignity.

With this danger full in my view, I shall proceed to examine the sentiments of Milton's tragedy,

which, though much less liable to censure than the disposition of his plan, are, like those of other writers, sometimes exposed to just exceptions for want of care, or want of discernment.

Sentiments are proper and improper as they consist more or less with the character and circumstances of the person to whom they are attributed, with the rules of the composition in which they are found, or with the settled and unalterable nature of things.

It is common among the tragick poets to introduce their persons alluding to events or opinions, of which they could not possibly have any knowledge. The barbarians of remote or newly discovered regions often display their skill in European learning. The god of love is mentioned in Tamerlane with all the familiarity of a Roman epigrammatist; and a late writer has put Harvey's doctrine of the circulation of the blood into the mouth of a Turkish statesman, who lived near two centuries before it was known even to philosophers or anatomists.

Milton's learning, which acquainted him with the manners of the ancient eastern nations, and his invention, which required no assistance from the coinmon cant of poetry, have preserved him from frequent outrages of local or chronological propriety. Yet he has mentioned Chalybean steel, of which it is not very likely that his chorus should have heard, and has made Alp the general name of a mountain, in a region where the Alps could scarcely be known:

No medicinal liquor can assuage,

Nor breath of cooling air from snowy Alp.

He has taught Samson the tales of Circe, and the Syrens, at which he apparently hints in his colloquy with Delilah :

--I know thy trains,

Tho' dearly to my cost, thy gins and toils;
Thy fair enchanted cup, and warbling charms,
No more on me have pow'r.

But the grossest error of this kind is the solemn introduction of the Phoenix in the last scene; which is faulty, not only as it is incongruous to the personage to whom it is ascribed, but as it is so evidently contrary to reason and nature, that it ought never to be mentioned but as a fable in any serious poem:

Virtue giv'n for lost,
Deprest, and overthrown, as seem'd
Like that self-begotten bird

In the Arabian woods embost

That no second knows, nor third,"

And lay ere while a holocaust;

From out her ashy womb now teem'd,

Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deem'd.

And tho' her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird, ages of lives.

Another species of impropriety is the unsuitableness of thoughts to the general character of the poem. The seriousness and solemnity of tragedy necessarily reject all pointed or epigrammatical expressions, all remote conceits and opposition of ideas. Samson's complaint is therefore too elaborate to be natural:

As in the land of darkness, yet in light,
To live a life half dead, a living death,
And bury'd; but, O yet more miserable!
Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave!
Bury'd, yet not exempt,

By privilege of death and burial,

From worst of other evils, pains and wrongs.

All allusions to low and trivial objects, with which contempt is usually associated, are doubtless unsuitable to a species of composition which ought to be always awful, though not always magnificent. The remark therefore of the chorus on good or bad news seems to want elevation:

Manoah. A little stay will bring some notice hither

Chor. Of good or bad so great, of bad the sooner; For evil news rides post, while good news baits.

But of all meanness that has least to plead which is produced by mere verbal conceits, which, depending only upon sounds, lose their existence by the change of a syllable. Of this kind is the following dialogue:

Chor. But had we best retire? I see a storm.
Sams. Fair days have oft contracted wind and rain.
Chor. But this another kind of tempest brings.
Sams. Be less abstruse, my riddling days are past

Chor. Look now for no enchanting voice, nor fear
The bait of honied words; a rougher tongue
Draws hitherward, I know him by his stride,
The giant Harapha.

He has taught Samson the tales of Circe, and the Syrens, at which he apparently hints in his colloquy with Delilah :

-I know thy trains,

Tho' dearly to my cost, thy gins and toils;
Thy fair enchanted cup, and warbling charms,
No more on me have pow'r.

But the grossest error of this kind is the solemn introduction of the Phoenix in the last scene; which is faulty, not only as it is incongruous to the personage to whom it is ascribed, but as it is so evidently contrary to reason and nature, that it ought never to be mentioned but as a fable in any serious poem:

--Virtue giv'n for lost,

Deprest, and overthrown, as seem'd
Like that self-begotten bird

In the Arabian woods embost
That no second knows, nor third,"

And lay ere while a holocaust;

From out her ashy womb now teem'd,

Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most

When most unactive deem'd.

And tho' her body die, her fame survives,
A secular bird, ages of lives.

Another species of impropriety is the unsuitableness of thoughts to the general character of the poem. The seriousness and solemnity of tragedy necessarily reject all pointed or epigrammatical expressions, all remote conceits and opposition of ideas. Samson's complaint is therefore too elaborate to be natural: