might seem too profuse, to give any certain account of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting.

And lastly, what king or knight before the conquest might be. chosen in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian hero." From various passages of his works it is clear that he had meditated taking as the subject of a great epic, among others, the half-fabulous adventures of Arthur, and throughout all his poems are scattered numberless allusions exhibiting his profound acquaintance with, and deep. admiration for, all the treasures of medieval romantic literature:-

"And what resounds

In fable or romance of Uther's son,
Begirt with British and Armoric knights;
And all who since, baptised or infidel,
Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,
Damasco, or Morocco, or Trebisond,
Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore,
When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabia."

No language that we could use would be sufficiently strong to express the extent and exactness of this writer's learning; a word which we use in its largest and most comprehensive sense: no species of literature, no language, no book, no art or science seems to have escaped his curiosity, or resisted the combined ardour and patience of his industry. His works may be considered as a vast arsenal of ideas drawn from every region of human speculation, and either themselves the condensed quintessence of knowledge and wisdom, or dressing and adorning the fairest and most majestic conceptions. If Shakspeare's immortal dramas are like the rich vegetation of a primeval paradise, in which all that is sweet, healing, and beautiful springs up uncultured from a virgin soil, the productions of Milton may justly be compared to one of those stately and magnificent gardens so much admired in a former age, in which the perceptible art and regularity rather sets off and adorns nature—a stately solitude perfumed by the breath of all home-born and exotic flowers, with lofty and airy music ever and anon floating through its moonlit solitudes, decorated by the divine forms of antique sculpture-now a Grace, a Cupid, or a Nymph of Phidias; now a prophet or a Sibyl of Michael Angelo.

In his delineation of what was perhaps the most difficult portion of his vast picture, the beauty, purity, and innocence of our first parents, he has shown not only a fertility of invention, but a severe and Scriptural purity of taste as surprising as it is rare. His Adam and Eve, without ceasing for a moment to be human, are beings worthy of the Paradise they inhabit. In the portraiture of their primeval beauty-the primeval perfection, fresh from the hand of God-there can be no doubt that the poet has embodied the impres

sions left on his mind by the contemplation of the great monuments of art which he had seen in Italy, and which he so well knew how to appreciate. The relics of ancient sculpture gave him in all probability something of their severe simplicity of outline, while the pictures of Raphael may have communicated the sweetness, grace, and heavenly expression of his supernatural and earthly personages. But of all the arts which have left their spirit to live and glow through the undying pages of 'Paradise Lost,' music is the one whose influence is most intensely and uninterruptedly felt. Of the power of music Milton held a most exalted idea; partly, perhaps, because its pure and ethereal pleasures were most in accordance with the heroic and celestial character of his mind; partly because it was the art which he had himself most successfully cultivated; and partly, too, no doubt, because it was the only art which his blindness, during a great portion of his life, left him the possibility of enjoying otherwise than in memory. The Paradise of Dante is composed of the two ideas of light and music; and in Milton, though less exclusively brought forward, music may be said to be the living spirit animating and pervading every creation of his genius. It is music which breathes in every changing harmony of his intricate and lofty versification; it is music which composes the noblest passages in his Heaven and his Paradise; it is music, too, which forms the only contrast with the hopeless agonies of his Hell: not the trivial and sensuous music of modern days, but those solemn and majestic harmonies which were so honoured in the religious and philosophical systems of ancient Greece, and which are perhaps not imperfectly reflected in the grand compositions of Paesiello, of Händel, and of Beethoven:

"The Dorian mood

Of flutes and soft recorders; such as raised
To height of noblest temper heroes old
Arming to battle; and, instead of rage,
Deliberate valour breathed, firm and unmoved;
Nor wanting power to mitigate and 'suage,

With solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase
Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow, and pain,
From mortal or immortal minds.'

The noble and reverential criticism of Campbell is at once sc complete and so condensed, that it will not, we think, be inappropriate to quote some passages of it in this place: nothing can be better or more discriminating:

"Milton has certainly triumphed over one difficulty of his subject, the paucity and the loneliness of its human agents; for no one in contemplating the garden of Eden would wish to exchange it for a more populous world. His earthly pair could only be represented, during their innocence, as beings of simple enjoyment and negatíve virtue, with no other passions than the fear of Heaven and the love

of each other. Yet from these materials what a picture has he drawn of their homage to the Deity, their mutual affection, and the horrors of their alienation! * * * *

*

"In the angelic warfare of the poem Milton has done whatever human genius could accomplish. * * * The warlike part of Paradise Lost' was inseparable from its subject. I feel too strong a reverence for Milton to suggest even the possibility that he could have improved his poem by having thrown his angelic warfare into more remote perspective; but it seems to me to be most sublime when it is least distinctly brought home to the imagination. What an awful effect has the dim and undefined conception of the conflict which we gather from the opening of the First Book! There the ministers of divine vengeance and pursuit had been recalled the thunders had ceased

"To bellow through the vast and boundless deep;

and our terrific conception of the past is deepened by its indistinctness.

"The array of the fallen angels in hell, the unfurling of the standard of Satan, and the march of his troops; all this human pomp and circumstance of war-all this is magic and overwhelming illusion. The imagination is taken by surprise. But the noblest efforts of language are tried with very unequal effect to interest us in the immediate and close view of the battle itself in the Sixth Book ; and the martial demons, who charmed us in the shades of hell, lose some portion of their sublimity when their artillery is discharged in the daylight of heaven.”

Another circumstance of admirable originality and effect in the supernatural delineations of the Paradise Lost' is the singular felicity with which Milton has given variety and interest to the personages of his fallen angels, by considering them as the demons afterwards destined to mislead mankind under the guise of the deities of classical mythology. The idea of the ancient oracles being the inspiration of infernal spirits, permitted for a time to delude the world, is not, it is true, originally Milton's; he found it pervading all the chivalrous and monkish legends of the Middle Ages; and though many poets have adopted a notion so admirably calculated to communicate poetical effect, and so well uniting Paganism with Christianity, none of them—not even Tasso, or our own Spenserhaye made such noble or such frequent use of this powerful means of exciting interest in a Christian work.

In the companion work to his immortal epic, in the 'Paradise Regained' the 'Odyssey' to our Christian 'Iliad' the first thing that strikes the reader is the unfortunate selection of the subject, and the general inferiority and weaker interest which marks the execution. Neither Milton, nor any human being who ever lived,

could have done justice to the only subject worthy of forming a pendant, or complement, to the tale

"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree.'

The subject to which we allude is, of course, the Crucifixion of our Saviour-the only event recorded in past, or possible in future times, of an interest sufficiently powerful, universal, and external, to be placed in comparison with the Fall of Man. Much as we may regret that Milton's peculiar and not very well-understood opinions respecting the divine nature of Christ, and the completeness of the sacrifice of the Redemption, induced him to select for the principal action of the 'Paradise Regained,' not the awful consummation of that sacrifice on the Mount of Calvary, but rather a comparatively unimportant incident in the earthly career of the Redeemer-the Temptation in the desert-it may be doubted whether even Milton's sublime genius could have worthily represented to mortal eyes that terrible crisis in the destiny of man. Sublime as were the flights of that eagle genius -and what intellect ever soared

"With plume so strong, so equal, and so soft,"

into the loftiest empyrean of poetry, the unshadowed glory of heaven's eternal atmosphere, the flower-breathing air of primeval Eden, or the "thick darkness" of hell?-it must have flagged-even that mighty and tireless pinion-in the gloom and thunder-cloud that veiled the more than human agonies of the Cross!

Of some of the minor works of Milton we have already said a few words. On those which we have left unnoticed it will hardly be necessary to dilate much more. The merit of these productions con"sists so much more peculiarly in the manner than in the matter, and they derive so much of their charm from their tone and mode of treatment, that a mere analysis would utterly fail in giving any idea of their excellences; while the reader may obtain from a single perusal of any of them, a much clearer notion of their style than from the most laboured and critical panegyric. They all bear the stamp of the Miltonic mind-fulness, conciseness, a pure and Scriptural severity and dignity, and the most consummate grace and variety of versification.

In Samson Agonistes,' Milton has given us in English a perfect Sophoclean tragedy, in which every minutest peculiarity of the Attic scene is so faithfully and exactly reproduced, that a reader unacquainted with the Greek language will form a much more just and correct notion of classical tragedy from reading the 'Samson' than from studying even the finest and most accurate translations of the great dramas of the Athenian theatre. This may appear extravagant, nay, even paradoxical; but we speak advisedly. The Greek trage

dies were grand historical compositions, founded upon the traditional or mythologic legends of the people for whom they were written, and whose religious and patriotic feelings were in the highest degree appealed to by what they considered as a sacred and affecting representation; exactly as the rude audience of the Middle Ages had their sensibilities powerfully excited by the mysteries. The Greek dramas were, in fact, the mysteries and miracle-plays of the Pagan world, and differed from those of the thirteenth century only in their greater polish and refinement as compositions. Now, the legends of classical mythology necessarily affect no less than the stories of the Scripture history; and consequently the 'Samson' (being in all points of structure and arrangement an exact fac-simile of a Greek tragedy) produces upon us, Christians, an effect infinitely more analogous to that made upon an Athenian by a tragedy of Sophocles than could be produced by our reading the best mere translation of a tragedy of Sophocles that the skill of man ever executed.

In Comus' Milton has given us the most perfect and exquisite specimen of a masque, or rather he has given us a kind of ennobled and glorified masque. The refinement, the elegance, the courtly grace and chivalry-all is there; but there is something in Comus' better, loftier, and grander than all this-something which no other masques, with all their refined, and scholarlike, and airy elegance, have ever approached—a high and philosophic vein of morality:"Divine philosophy,

Not harsh and rugged, as dull fools suppose,
But musical as is Apollo's lute;"

deep and grand thoughts fetched from the exhaustless fountains of the great minds of old-his beloved Plato and the Stagyrite-thoughts fresh with the immortality of their birthplace.

CHAPTER X.

BUTLER AND DRYDEN.

'The Commonwealth and the Restoration-Milton and Butler-Subject and Nature of Hudibras - Hudibras and Don Quixote-State of Society at the Restoration - Butler's Life - John Dryden-French Taste of the CourtComedies and Rhymed Tragedies-Life and Works of Dryden-Dramas- · Annus Mirabilis Absalom and Achitophel-Religio Laici-Hind and Panther-Dryden's later Works-Translation of Virgil - Odes-FablesPrefaces and Dedications-Juvenal - Mac Flecknoe.

THE great productions of literature may be looked at under two different aspects or relations. Every illustrious name in letters may be considered as typifying and expressing some great and strongly