 Section 14 of Beacon Length of History, vol. 13, Great Writers by John Lord. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Kay Hand. Lord Macaulay, Part II. The great subject of political agitation at this period was the repeal of the Corn Laws. The Whig leaders had lost the earnestness which had marked their grand efforts when they carried the reform bill of 1832, and were more indifferent to further reforms than suited their constituents. So that, at a dangerous financial crisis in 1841, the direction of the public affairs fell into the hands of the Tories under Sir Robert Peel. This great man not only rescued the nation from its fiscal embarrassments, but having been convinced by the arguments of Cobden of the necessity of repealing the Corn Laws, he carried through that great reform to the disgust of his party and to his own undying fame. I've treated of this period more at large in another volume of this series. Macaulay was not much moved by the fall of the ministry to which he belonged and gladly resumed his literary labors, the first fruits of his leisure being an essay on worn hastings, a companion piece to the one on Clive. These East Indian essays constitute the most picturesque and graphic account of British conquests in that ancient land that has been given to the public. Macaulay's intimate knowledge of the ground and his literary resources enabled him to picture the dazzling successes of Clive and Hastings so that the careers of those superb military chieftains and commercial robbers statesmen, in securing for their country the control of a distant province larger than France, and in enriching the British Empire and themselves beyond all precedents in conquest, stand splendidly portrayed forever. Macaulay had now taken apartments in the Albany on the second floor to which he removed his large library and in which he comfortably lived for fifteen years. His article on worn hastings was followed by that on Friedrich the Great. His numerous articles in the Edinburgh Review had now become so popular that there was a great demand for them in a separate form. Curiously enough, as in the case of Carlisle, it was in America that the public appreciation of these essays first took the form of book publication, and Macaulay's Miscellanies were published in Boston in 1840 and in Philadelphia in 1842. As these volumes began to go to England, for Macaulay's own protection they were republished by Longman, revised by the author in 1843, and obtained an immediate and immense sale, reaching 120,000 copies in England, which added to the fame and income of Macaulay. But he was never satisfied with the finish of his own productions. The only thing which seemed to comfort him was that these last essays were better than the first. In addition to his labors for the Edinburgh was the publication of a volume of his poems in 1842, which was also enthusiastically received by his admirers. His last notable essays were a chivalrous article on Madame d'Arblay, January 1843, an entirely charming account of Addison and the wits of Queen Anne's reign, July 1843. An interesting review of the memoirs of Brarray, the French Revolutionist and Writer, April 1844, and finally a second article on Lord Chatham, October 1844, which is considered finer than the first one written 20 years earlier. More and more, however, the project of writing a history of England had taken possession of him, and he began now to forego all other literary occupation and to devote all his leisure time to that great work. During much of the time that Macaulay had continued writing his reviews at the rate of about two in a year, he was an active member of parliament, frequently addressing the House of Commons and earning the gratitude of the country by his liberal and enlightened views, especially those in reference to the right of Unitarians to their chapels, to the enlarged money grant given to the Irish Roman Catholic Maynooth College, and to the extension of copyrights. He rarely spoke without careful preparation. His speeches were forcible and fine. In the higher field of debate, however, as we have already intimated, he was not successful. In 1845, Sir Robert Peale retired, the Whigs again coming into power, and in 1846, Macaulay accepted the Office of Paymaster of the Forces because its duties were comparatively light and would not much interfere with his literary labors, while it added £2,000 a year to his income. During the session of 1846 and 1847, while still in Parliament, he spoke only five times, although the House was ever ready to listen to him. In the year 1847, the disruption of the Scotch Church was affected, and in the bitterness engendered by that movement, Macaulay lost his popularity with his Edinburgh constituents. He seemed indifferent to their affairs. He answered their letters irregularly and with almost contemptuous brevity. He had no sympathy with the radicals who at that time controlled a large number of votes, and he refused to contribute towards electioneering expenses. Above all, he was absorbed in his history and had lost much of his interest in politics. In consequence, he failed to be reelected and not unwillingly retired to private life. Macaulay now concentrated all his energies on the history, which occupied his thoughts, his studies, and his pen for the most parts during the remainder of his life. The first two volumes were published in the latter part of 1843, and the sale was immense, surpassing that of any historical work in the history of literature, and coming near to the sale of the novels of Sir Walter Scott. The popularity of the work was not confined to scholars and statesmen and critics, but it was equally admired by ordinary readers, and not in England and Scotland alone, but in the United States, in France, in Holland, in Germany, and other countries. The labour expended on these books was prodigious. The author visited in person nearly all the localities in England and Ireland where the events he narrated took place. He ransacked the archives of most of the governments of Europe, and all the libraries to which he could gain access, public and private. He worked 12 hours a day and yet produced on average only two printed pages daily. So careful was he in verifying his facts and in arranging his materials, writing and rewriting until no further improvement could be made. This book was not merely the result of his researches for the last 15 years of his life, but of his general reading for nearly 50 years, when everything he read he remembered. Says Thackery. He reads 20 books to write a sentence. He travels 100 miles to make a line of description. The extent and exactness of his knowledge were not only marvellous but almost incredible. Mr. Buckle declared that Macaulay was perfectly accurate in all the facts which Buckle had himself investigated to write his history of civilization. And so particular was he in the selection of words that he never allowed a sentence to pass muster until it was as good as he could make it. He thought little of reconstructing a paragraph, says his biographer, for the sake of one happy illustration. He submitted to the most tiresome mechanical drudgery in the correction of his proof sheets. The clearness of his thought amid the profusion of his knowledge was represented in his writing by a remarkable conciseness of expression. His short vigorous sentences are compact with details of fact, yet rich with color. His terseness has been compared to that of Tacitus. His power of condensation, aptness of phrase and epithet, an indomitable industry made him a master of rhetorical effect in the use of his multifarious learning for the illustration of his themes. As soon as his last proof sheet had been despatched to the printers, Macaulay once fell to reading a series of historians from Herodotus downward to measure his writings with theirs. Thucydides especially utterly destroyed all the conceit which naturally would arise from his unbounded popularity, as expressed in every social and literary circle, as well as in the reviews. Like Michelangelo, this Englishman was never satisfied with his own productions and the only comfort he took in the impossibility of realizing his ideal was in the comparison he made of his own works with similar ones by contemporary authors. Then he was content, and then only appeared in his letters and diary that good-natured, self-satisfied feeling which arose from the consciousness that he was one of the most fortunate authors who had ever lived. There was nothing cynical in his sense of superiority but an amiable self-assertion and self-confidence that only made men smile. As when Lord Palmerston remarked that, he wished he was as certain of any one thing as Tom Macaulay was of everything. This confidence rarely provoked opposition except when he was positive as to things outside his sphere. He wrote and talked sensibly and luminously on financial and social questions, on art, on poetry and the drama, on philosophy and theology, but on these subjects he was not in authority with specialists. In other words, he did not, so to speak, know everything profoundly, but only superficially. Yet in history, especially English history, he was profound in analysis as well as brilliant in the narration of facts, even when there was disagreement between himself and others as to the inductions he drew from those facts, inductions colored by his strong prejudices and aristocratic surroundings. Macaulay was not always consistent with his own theories, however. For instance, he was a firm believer in the progress of society and of civilization. He saw the enormous gulf between the 9th and the 19th centuries and the unmistakable advance which, since the times of Hildebrand, the world had made in knowledge, in the arts, in liberty, and in the comforts of life, although the tide of progress had its ebb and flow in different ages and countries. Yet when he cast his eye on America, where perhaps the greatest progress had been made in the world's history within 50 years, he saw nothing but melancholy signs of anarchy and decay, signs portending the collapse of liberty and the triumph of ignorance and crime. Thus he writes in 1857 to an American correspondent, As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the old world, but the time will come when wages will be as low and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. Then your institutions will fairly be brought to the test. Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million while another cannot get a full meal. In bad years there's plenty of grumbling here and sometimes a little rioting, but it matters little for here the sufferers are not the rulers. The supreme power is in the hands of a class deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of order. Accordingly the mount contents are restrained, but with you the majority is the government and has the rich who are always a minority absolutely at its mercy. The day will come when the multitude of people none of whom has had more than half a breakfast or expects to have more than half a dinner will choose a legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of legislature will be chosen? On the one side is a statesman preaching patience, respect for vested rights, strict observance of the public faith, and on the other a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalists and usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne and ride in a carriage, while thousands of honest folks are in one of necessaries. Which of the two candidates is likely to be preferred by a working man who hears his children cry for more bread? There will be, I fear, spoiliation. The spoiliation will increase the distress, the distress will produce fresh spoiliation. There is nothing to stop you. Your constitution is all sale and no anchor. Either civilization or liberty will perish. Either some Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of the government with a strong hand, or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste by barbarians in the 20th century as the Roman Empire was in the 5th. I do not deny that there is great force in Macaulay's reasoning and prophecy. History points to decline and ruin when public virtue has fled and government is in the hands of demagogues, for their reign has ever been succeeded by military usurpers who have preserved civilization indeed, but at the expense of liberty. Yet this reasoning applies not only to America but to England as well, especially since, by the reform bill and subsequent enactments of parliament, she has opened the gates to an increase of suffrage which now threatens to become universal. The enfranchisement of the people, the enlarged powers of the individual under the protection and control of the commonwealth, is the Anglo-Saxon contribution to progress. It is dangerous. So is all power until its use is learned. But there is no backward step possible. The tremendous experiment must go forward for England and America alike. Macaulay himself was one of the most prominent of English statesmen and orators in 1830, 1831, and 1832 to advocate the extension of the right of suffrage and the increase of popular liberties. All his writings are on the side of liberty in England and all are in opposition to the Taurism which was so triumphant during the reign of George III. Why did he have faith in the English people of England and yet show so little in the English people of America? He believed in political and social progress for his own countrymen, why should he doubt the utility of the same in other countries? If vandalism is to be the fate of America where education, the only truly conservative element, is more diffused than in England, why should it not equally triumph in that country when the masses have gained political power, as they surely will at some time, and even speedily if the policy inaugurated by Gladstone is to triumph? For England, Macaulay had unbounded hope because he believed in progress. In liberty, in education, in the civilizing influence of machinery, in the increasing comforts of life through the constant increase of wealth among the middle classes, and especially through the power of Christianity in spite of the dissensions of sects, the attacks of crude philosophers, socialists, anarchists, scientists, and atheists from one end of Christendom to the other. Why should he not have equal faith in American civilization which, in spite of wars and strikes and commercial distresses and political corruption, has yet made a market progress from the time of Jefferson, the apostle of equality, down to our day, as seen especially in the multiplication of schools and colleges in an untrammeled and watchful press, and in the active benevolence of the rich and the foundation of every kind of institution to relieve misery and want? The truth is that he, in common with most educated Englishmen of his day, and too many even of our own day, cherished a silent contempt for Americans for their literature and their institutions, and hence he was not only inconsistent in the principles which he advocated, but showed that he was not emancipated with all his learning from the prejudices of which he ought to have been ashamed. As time made inroads on Macaulay's strong constitution, he gave up both politics and society in the absorbing interest which he took in his history, confining himself to his library and sometimes allowing months to pass without accepting any invitation whatever to a social gathering. No man was ever more disenchanted with society. He begrudged his time even when tempted by the calls of friendship. When visitors penetrated to his den, he bowed them out with ironical politeness. He had no favors to ask from friends or foes for he declined political office and was as independent as wealth or fame could make him. In 1849 he was made Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow and the acclamations following his address were prodigious. Lord John Russell gave to Macaulay's brother John a living worth of 1,100 pounds. Macaulay himself was offered the professorship of history at Cambridge. In one year he received for the first edition of his third and fourth volumes of the history, published in 1855, 20,000 pounds in a single check from Longman. At the age of 49 he writes in his diary, I have no cause for complaint, tolerable health, competence, liberty, leisure, dear relatives and friends and a very great literary reputation. With all this prosperity Macaulay now naturally set up his carriage. He dined often with the Queen and was a great man according to English notions more even from his wealth and social position than from his success in letters. Lord John Russell pressed him to accept a seat in his cabinet but I told him Macaulay writes that I should be of no use, that I was not a debater, that it was too late to become one, that my temper, taste and literary habits alike prevented. He was, however, induced to become again a member of parliament and in 1852 was elected once more for Edinburgh which had repented of its rejection of him in 1847. But he insisted on perfect independence to vote as he pleased. He regarded this re-entrance into public life as a great personal sacrifice since it might postpone the appearance of his next two volumes of the history. His election, however, was received with great acclamation. Even Professor Wilson, the most conservative of Scotch Tories, voted for him. It was not a party victory but purely a personal triumph. A serious illness now follows, a weakness of the heart from the effects of which Macaulay died a few years afterwards. He retires to Clifton and gives himself up to getting well, visiting Barley Wood and driving in his private carriage among the most interesting scenery in the west of England. But he was never perfectly well again, although he continued to work on his history. His intimate friend saw that change in him was sadness, but he himself was serene and uncomplaining. Although he suffered from an oppression of the chest, he still on great occasions addressed the house. His mind was clear, but his voice was faint. The last speech he made was in behalf of the independence of the Scottish Church. The strain of the House of Commons proved to be too great for his now enfeebled constitution. Nor could he conceal from himself and his friends, says Trevelyan, that it was a grievous waste, while the reign of Anne still remained unwritten, for him to consume his scanty stock of vigor in the tedious and exhaustive routine of political existence, waiting the whole evenings for the vote and then trudging home at three in the morning through the slush of a February thought. He therefore spared himself as a member of Parliament and carefully husbanded his powers in order to work upon his book. He gave himself more time for his annual vacation, yet would write when he could on the subjects which engrossed his life. His labors were too severe for his strength, but he worked on, and even harder and harder. At length, on the 25th of November 1855, Macaulay sent to the printer the last 20 pages of his history, and an addition of 25,000 was ordered. Within a generation, 140,000 copies of the work were sold in the United Kingdom alone. Six rival translators were engaged in turning it into German, and it was published in the Polish, the Danish, the Swedish, the Italian, the French, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Hungarian, the Russian, and the Bohemian languages, to say nothing of its immense circulation in the United States. Such extraordinary literary popularity was accompanied by great honors. In 1857, Macaulay was created a British peer and elected Lord Hyde Stewart of the borough of Cambridge. The academies of Utrecht, Munich, and Turin elected him to honorary membership. The king of Prussia made him a member of the Order of Merit. Oxford conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Civil Law, and he was elected president of the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh. He could have done little more in the way of academic and governmental honors. The failing health of Macaulay now compelled him to resign his seat in the House of Commons. He was also thought desirable for him to vacate his apartments at the Albany, which he had occupied for fifteen years, that he might be more retired and perhaps more comfortable. His friends, at the suggestion of Dean Millman, selected a beautiful house in Kensington, the rooms of which were small except the library, which opened upon a beautiful lawn, adorned with flowers and shrubs. It was called Holly Lodge and was very secluded and attractive. Here his lander days were spent, in the society of his nieces and a few devoted friends, and in dispensing simple hospitalities. His favorite form of entertainment was the breakfast, at which his guests would linger till twelve, enchanted by his conversation, for his mind showed no signs of decay. From this charming retreat Lord Macaulay very seldom appeared in London's society. Years passed without his event accepting invitations. An occasional night at a friend's house in the country, one or two nights at Windsor Castle, and one or two visits to Lord Stanhope's seat in Kent in order to consult his magnificent library, were the only visits which Macaulay made in the course of the year. He always had a dislike of visiting in private houses, much preferring hotels where he could be free from conventional life. Macaulay was always careful in his expenditures, wasting nothing that he might enjoy the pleasure of charity, for he gave liberally, especially to needy and unfortunate men of letters. Once he gave one hundred pounds to his total stranger who implored his aid. In his household he was revered for he was the kindest and most considerate of masters, while his relatives absolutely worshipped him. At home he may no claim to the privileges of genius. He had few eccentricities. He never interfered with the pleasures of others. He never obtruded his advice or demanded that his own views or tastes should be consulted. He was especially careful not to wound the feelings of those with whom he lived. Children were his delight and solace. Over them he seemed to have unbounding influence. He would spend the half of a busy day in playing with them and in inventing new games for their diversion. One of his pleasures was to take them to see the sights of London. His sympathies were quick and generous, although apparently so cynical in the opinions of his books he was always affected at any touches of pathos, even to tears. It was hard for Macaulay to realize that the time had come when he must leave untold that portion of English history with which he was more familiar than any other living man, but he submitted to the inevitable without repining. He had done when he could. Even when he was compelled to give up his daily task, his love of reading remained. A book was his solace to the last. He had no extensive acquaintance with the works of some of the best writers of his own generation, preferring the classic authors of antiquity and of England in the time of Ann. He did not relish Coleridge or Carlyle or Buckle or Ruskin, or indeed any writer who seemed to strain after originality of style, in defiance of the old and conservative canons. He preferred Miss Austin to Dickens. He felt that he owed it great debt to the masterminds of bygone ages who reached perfection of style, so far as it can be attained. Even the English writers of the reign of Ann to his mind have never been surpassed. His admiration for Addison was unbounded. Dryden and Pope to him were greater poets than anyone who have succeeded them. Such a poet as Tennyson or Wordsworth he pretended he did not understand. He wanted a transparent clearness of expression. Browning would have been to him an abomination. He despised the poetry of his own age with its involved sentences, its obscurity and its strange meters. His own poetry was as direct as Homer, as simple as Chaucer, and as graphic as Scott. In 1859 Macaulay contrived to visit once more the English lakes and the Western Highlands where he was received with great veneration, being recognized everywhere on steamers and railway stations. But his cheerfulness had now departed, although he made an effort to be agreeable. In December of this year he ceased writing in his diary. The physicians pretended to think that he was better but fainting fits set in. One Christmas he said but little and was constantly dropping to sleep. His relatives did not seem to think that he was in immediate danger but the end was near. He died without pain and was buried in Westminster Abbey on the 9th of January 1860, having for pallbearers the most illustrious men in England. He rests in the poet's corner, among the tombs of Johnson and Garrick, Handel and Goldsmith, Gay and Addison, leaving behind him an immortal fame. And what is this fame? It is not that of a philosophical historian like Guizot, for his history is not marked by profound generalizations or even thoughtful reflections. He was not a judicial historian like Hallam seeking to present the truth alone, for he was a partisan full of party prejudices. Nor was he an historian like rank, raking out the hidden facts of a remote period and unveiling the astute diplomacy of past ages. Mokale was a great historical painter of the realistic school whose pictures have never been surpassed or even equaled for vividness and interest. In this class of historians he stands out alone and peerless, the most exciting and the most interesting of all the historians who have depicted the manners, the events, and the characters of a former age. Never by any accidents dull but fatiguing, if at all, only by his wealth of illustration and the over-brilliancy of his coloring. He is the Titian of word painting and as such will live like that immortal colorist. Critics may say what they please about his rhetoric, about his partial statements, about his want of insight into deep philosophical questions, but as a painter who made his figures stand out on the historical canvas with unique vividness, Mokale cannot fail to be regarded as long as the English language is spoken or written as one of the great masters of literary composition. This was the verdict pronounced by the English nation at large, and its great political and literary leaders expressed and confirmed it when they gave him fortune and fame, elevated him to the peerage, bestowed on him stars and titles, and buried him with Auguste's solemnity among those illustrious men who gave to England its power and glory. End of section 14. Section 15 of Beacon Lights of History, volume 13, Great Writers by John Lord. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Kay Hand, Shakespeare or the poet Part 1, 1564 to 1616 by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Great men are more distinguished by range and extent than by originality. If we require the originality which consists in weaving, like a spider, their web from their own bowels, in finding clay and making bricks and building the house, no great men are original. Nor does valuable originality consist in unlikeness to other men. The hero is in the press of night and the thick of events, and seeing what men want and sharing their desire, he adds the needful length of sight and of arm to come at the desired point. The greatest genius is the most indebted man. A poet is no rattlebrained saying what comes uppermost and because he says everything, saying at last something good, but a heart in unison with his time and country. There is nothing whimsical and fantastic in his production, but sweet and sad, earnest, freighted with the weightiest convictions and pointed with the most determined aim which any man or class knows of in his times. The genius of our life is jealous of individuals and will not have any individual great except through the general. There is no choice to genius. A great man does not wake up on some fine morning and say, I am full of life. I will go to sea and find an Antarctic continent today. I will square the circle. I will ransack botany and find a new food for man. I have a new architecture in my mind. I foresee a new mechanic power. No, but he finds himself in the river of the thoughts and events, forced onward by the ideas and necessities of his contemporaries. He stands where all the eyes of men look one way, and their hands all point in the direction in which he should go. The church has reared him amidst rites and pumps, and he carries out the advice which her music gave him and builds a cathedral needed by her chance in processions. He finds a war raging. It educates him by trumpet in barracks, and he betters the instruction. He finds two counties groping to bring coal or flour or fish from the place of production to the place of consumption, and he hits on a railroad. Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people and in his love of the materials he wrought in. What an economy of power! And what a compensation for the shortness of life! All is done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their labors. Choose any other thing out of the line of tendency, out of the national feeling in history, and he would have all to do for himself. His powers would not be expended in the first preparations. Great genio power, one would almost say, consists in not being original at all, in being altogether receptive, in letting the world do all, and suffering the spirit of the hour to pass unobstructed through the mind. Shakespeare's youth fell in a time when the English people were importunate for dramatic entertainments. The court took offense easily at political illusions and attempted to suppress them. The Puritans, a growing and energetic party, and the religious among the Anglican church would suppress them. But the people wanted them. In yards, houses without roofs, and extemporaneous enclosures at county fairs were the ready theaters of strolling players. The people had tasted this new joy, and, as we could not hope to suppress newspapers now, no, not by the strongest party, neither could the King, Prelate, or Puritan alone or united suppress an organ which was ballad, epic, newspaper, caucus, lecture, punch, and library at the same time. Probably King, Prelate, and Puritan all found their own account in it, and had become, by all causes, a national interest, by no means conspicuous, so that some great scholar would have thought of treating it in an English history, but not a wit less considerable because it was cheap and of no account, like a baker's shop. The best proof of its vitality is the crowd of writers which suddenly broke into this field. Kid, Marlowe, Green, Johnson, Chapman, Decker, Webster, Heywood, Middleton, Peel, Ford, Massinger, Beaumont, and Fletcher. The secure possession, by the stage of the public mind, is of the first importance to the poet who works for it. He loses no time in idle experiments. Here is audience and expectation prepared. In the case of Shakespeare there is much more. At the time when he left Stratford and went up to London, a great body of stage plays of all dates and writers existed in manuscript and were in turn produced on the boards. Here is the tale of Troy which the audience will bear hearing some part of every week, the death of Julius Caesar and other stories out of Plutarch which they never tire of, a shelf full of English history from the chronicles of Brut and Arthur down to the Royal Henrys which men hear eagerly, and a string of doleful tragedies, merry Italian tales, and Spanish voyages which all the London apprentices know. All the mass has been treated with more or less skill by every playwright and the prompter has soiled and tattered manuscripts. It is now no longer possible to say who wrote them first. They have been the property of the theatre so long and so many rising geniuses have enlarged or altered them, inserting a speech or a whole scene or adding a song, that no man can any longer claim copyright in this work of numbers. Happily no man wishes to. They are not yet desired in that way. We have few readers, many spectators and hearers. They had best lie where they are. Shakespeare and common with his comrades esteemed the massive old play's waste stock in which any experiment could be freely tried. Had the prestige which hedges about a modern tragedy existed, nothing could have been done. The rude warm blood of the living England circulated in the play as in street ballads and gave body which he wanted to his airy and majestic fantasy. The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work and which again may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice, and in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination. In short, the poet owes to his legend what sculpture owed to the temple. Sculpture in Egypt and in Greece grew up in subordination to architecture. It was the ornament of the temple wall. At first a rude relief carved on pediments, then the relief became bolder and a head or arm was projected from the wall, the groups being still arranged with reference to the building, which serves also as a frame to hold the figures. And when, at last, the greatest freedom of style and treatment was reached, the prevailing genius of architecture still enforced a certain calmness and continence in the statue. As soon as the statue was begun for itself, and with no reference to the temple or palace, the art began to decline. Freak, extravagance and exhibition took the place of the old temperance. This balance wheel, which the sculptor found in architecture, the perilous irritability of poetic talent found in the accumulated dramatic materials to which the people were already wanted, and which had a certain excellence which no single genius, however extraordinary, could hope to create. In point of fact, it appears that Shakespeare did owe debts in all direction and was able to use whatever he found, and the amount of indebtedness may be inferred from alone's laborious computations in regard to the first, second, and third parts of Henry V, in which, out of 6,043 lines, 1,771 were written by some author preceding Shakespeare, 2,373 by him, on the foundations laid by his predecessors, and 1,899 were entirely his own. And the preceding investigation hardly leaves a single drama of his absolute invention. Malone's sentence is an important piece of external history. In Henry VIII I think I see plainly the cropping out of the original rock on which his own finer stratum was laid. The first play was written by a superior, thoughtful man with a vicious ear. I can mark his lines and know well their cadence. See Wolsey's Sililloquie in the following scene with Cromwell where, instead of the meter of Shakespeare, whose secret is that the thought constructs the tune so that reading for the sense will best bring out the rhythm. Here the lines are constructed on a given tune and the verse has even a trace of pulpit eloquence. But the play contains, through all its length, unmistakable traits of Shakespeare's hand, and some passages, as the accounts of the coronation are like autographs. What is odd, the compliment to Queen Elizabeth is in the bad rhythm. Shakespeare knew that tradition supplies a better fable than any invention can. If he lost any credit of design he augmented his resources, and at that day our petulant demand for originality was not so much pressed. There was no literature for the million. The universal reading, the cheap press, were unknown. A great poet who appears in illiterate times absorbs into his sphere all the light which is anywhere radiating. Every intellectual jewel, every flower of sentiment, it is his fine office to bring to his people, and it comes to value his memory equally with his invention. He is therefore little solicitous once his thoughts have been derived, whether through translation, whether through tradition, whether by travel in distant countries, whether by inspiration. From whatever source they are equally welcome to his uncritical audience. Nay, he borrows very near home. Other men say wise things as well as he, only they say a good many foolish things and do not know when they have spoken wisely. He knows the sparkle of the true stone and puts it in a high place wherever he finds it. Such is the happy position of Homer, perhaps, of Chaucer, of Savi. They felt that all wit was their wit, and they are librarians and historiographers as well as poets. Each romance was air and dispenser of all the hundred tales of the world, presenting thebes and pull-ups line and the tale of Troy Divine. The influence of Chaucer is conspicuous in all our early literature, and more recently not only Pope and Dryden have been beholden to him, but in the whole society of English writers, a large unacknowledged debt is easily traced. One is charmed with the opulence which feeds so many pensioners. But Chaucer is a huge borrower. Chaucer, it seems, drew continually through Leidegate and Caxton from Guido di Colona, whose Latin romance of the Trojan War was in turn a compilation from Bara's Furgius, Ophid, and Statius. Then Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the provincial poets, tower his benefactors. The Romant of the Rose is only judicious translation from William of Loris and John of Mung, Troilius and Cressidae from Lolius of Urbino, the Cock and the Fox from the Lae de Marie, the House of Fame from the French or Italian, and poor Gower he uses as if he were only a brick kiln or stone quarry out of which to build his house. He steals by this apology that what he takes has no worth where he finds it and the greatest where he leaves it. It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man whom he once shown himself capable of original writing is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion. Thought is the property of him who can entertain it and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts, but as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own. Thus, all originality is relative. Every thinker is retrospective. The learned member of the legislature, at Westminster or at Washington, speaks in votes for thousands. Show us the constituency and the now invisible channels by which the senator is made aware of their wishes. The crowd of practical and knowing men, who by correspondence or conversation, are feeding him with evidence, anecdotes, and estimates, and it will bereave his fight attitudes and resistance of something of their impressiveness. As Sir Robert Peale and Mr. Webster vote, so lock in or so think for thousands, and so there were fountains around Homer, Manu, Sadie, or Milton from which they drew. Friends, lovers, books, traditions, proverbs, all perished, which, if seen, would go to reduce the wonder. Did the bard speak with authority? Did he feel himself overmatched by any companion? The appeal is to the consciousness of the writer. Is there at last in his breast a Delphi whereof to ask concerning any thought or thing, whether it be verily so, yea, or nay, and to have answer and to rely on that? All the debts which such a man could contract to other wits would never disturb his consciousness of originality, for the administrations of books and of other minds are a whiff of smoke to that most private reality with which he has conversed. It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius in the world was no man's work but came by wide social labor when a thousand wrought like one sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language, but it was not made by one man or at one time, but centuries and churches brought it to perfection. There never was a time when there was not some translation existing. The liturgy, admired for its energy and pathos, is an anthology of the piety of ages and nations, a translation of the prayers and forms of the Catholic Church. These collected two in long periods from the prayers and meditations of every saint and sacred writer all over the world. Grotius makes the like remark in respect to the Lord's Prayer that the single clauses of which it is comprised were already in use in the time of Christ, in the rabbinical forms. He picked out the grains of gold. The nervous language of the common law, the impressive forms of our courts and the precision and substantial truth of the legal distinctions are the contribution of all the sharp-sided, strong-minded men who have lived in the countries where these laws govern. The translation of Plutarch gets its excellence by being translation on translation. There never was a time when there was none. All the truly idiomatic and national phrases are kept and all others successively picked out and thrown away. Something like the same process had gone on long before with the originals of these books. The world takes liberties with world books. Vetus, Aesop's fables, Pilpe, Arabian knights, Cede, Iliad, Robin Hood, Scottish minstrelstry are not the work of single men. In the composition of such works the time thinks, the market thinks, the mason, the carpenter, the merchant, the farmer, the fop, all think for us. Every book supplies its time with one good word. Every municipal law, every trade, every folly of the day, and the generic Catholic genius who is not afraid or ashamed to owe his originality to the originality of all, stands with the next age as the recorder and embodiment of his own. We have to thank the researchers of antiquaries and the Shakespeare Society for ascertaining the steps of the English drama from the mystery celebrated in churches and by churchmen, and the final detachment from the church, and the completion of Secular Plays from Pharex and Porex, and Gammergurtin's Needle, down to the possession of the stage by the very pieces which Shakespeare altered, remodeled, and finally made his own. Elated with success and piqued by the growing interest of the problem, they have left no bookstall unsearched, no chest and a garret unopened, no file of old yellow accounts to decompose and damp and worms, so keen was the hope to discover whether the boy Shakespeare poached or not, whether he held horses at the theater door, whether he kept school, and why he left in his will only his second best bed to Anne Hathaway, his wife. There is something touching in the madness with which the passing age mischoses the object on which all candles shine and all eyes are turned. The care with which it registers every trifle touching Queen Elizabeth and King James, the Essexes, Leichesters, Burleys, and Buckingham's, and let's pass without a single valuable note the founder of another dynasty, which alone will cause the Tudor dynasty to be remembered, the man who carries the Saxon race in him by the inspiration which feeds him, and on whose thoughts the foremost people of the world are now for some ages to be nourished, and minds to receive this and not another bias. A popular player, nobody suspected he was the poet of the human race, and the secret was kept as faithfully from poets and intellectual men as from courtiers and frivolous people. Bacon, who took the inventory of the human understanding for his times, never mentioned his name. Ben Johnson, though we have strained his few words of regard and panagiric, had no suspicion of the elastic fame whose first vibrations he was attempting. He no doubt thought the praise he has conceded to him generous, and esteemed himself out of all question the better poet of the two. If it need wit to know wit according to the proverb, Shakespeare's time should be capable of recognizing it. Sir Henry Watten was born four years after Shakespeare, and died 23 years after him. And I find, among his correspondence and acquaintances, the following persons. The Orore Beza, Isaac Cossibon, Sir Philip Sidney, The Earl of Essex, Lord Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Milton, Sir Henry Vane, Isaac Walton, Dr. Don, Abraham Colley, Bellarmine, Charles Cotton, John Pym, John Haines, Kepler, Vietta, Albaricus Gentilius, Paul Sarpy, Arminius, with all of whom exist some token of his having communicated without enumerating many others whom he doubtless saw, Shakespeare, Spencer, Johnson, Beaumont, Massenger, the two airbears, Marlowe, Chapman, and the rest. Since the constellation of great men who appeared in Greece in the time of Pericles, there was never any such society. Yet their genius failed them to find out the best head in the universe. Our poet's mask was impenetrable. You cannot see the mountain near. It took a century to make it suspected, and not until two centuries had passed after his death did any criticism which we think adequate begin to appear. It was not possible to write the history of Shakespeare till now, for he is the father of German literature. It was with the introduction of Shakespeare into German by Lessing and the translation of his works by Weyland and Schweigel that the rapid burst of German literature was most intimately connected. It was not until the 19th century whose speculative genius is a sort of living Hamlet that the tragedy of Hamlet could find such wandering readers. Now literature, philosophy, and thought are Shakespeare-ized. His mind is the horizon beyond which at present we do not see. Our ears are educated in music by his rhythm. Coleridge and Guerta are the only critics who have expressed our convictions with any adequate fidelity. But there is in all cultivated minds a silent appreciation of his superlative power and beauty, which like Christianity qualifies the period. End of Section 15. Section 16 of Beacon Lights of History, Volume 13, Great Writers by John Lord. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Kay Hand. Shakespeare, or the poet, Part 2. The Shakespeare Society have inquired in all directions, advertised the missing facts, offered money for any information that will lead to proof, and with what result? Beside some important illustration of the history of the English stage, to which I have adverted, they have gleaned a few facts touching the property and dealings in regard to the property of the poet. It appears that from year to year he owned a larger share in the Black Friars Theatre. Its wardrobe and other appurtenances were his. That he bought an estate in his native village with his earnings as writer and shareholder. That he lived in the Best House in Stratford, was entrusted by his neighbors with their commissions in London, as of borrowing money and the like. That he was a veritable farmer. About the time when he was writing Macbeth, he sues Philip Rogers in the Borough Court of Stratford for 35 shillings ten pence, for corn delivered to him at different times. And in all respects appears as a good husband with no reputation for eccentricity or excess. He was a good natured sort of man, an actor and shareholder in the theatre, not in any striking manner distinguished from other actors and debanagers. I admit the importance of this information. It was well worth the pains that have been taken to procure it. But whatever scraps of information concerning his condition these researches may have rescued, they can shed no light upon that infinite invention which is the concealed magnet of his attraction for us. We are very clumsy writers of history. We tell the chronicle of parentage, birth, birthplace, schooling, schoolmates, earning of money, marriage, publication of books, celebrity, death. And when we have come to an end of this gossip, no ray of relation appears between it and the goddess born. And it seems as if, had we dipped at random into the modern Plutarch and read any other life there, it would have fitted the poems as well. It is the essence of poetry to spring, like the rainbow daughter of wonder from the invisible, to abolish the past and refuse all history. Malone, Warburton, Dice, and Collier have wasted their oil. The famed theatres, Covent Garden, Drury Lane, The Park, and Tremont have vainly assisted. Bederton, Garrick, Kemble, Keen, and McCready dedicate their lives to this genius. Him they crown, elucidate, obey, and express. The genius knows them not. The recitation begins. One golden word leaps out immortal from all this painted pedantry and sweetly torments us with invitations to its own inaccessible homes. I remember I went once to see the hamlet of a famed performer, the pride of the English stage, and all I then heard and all I now remember of the tradition was that in which the tradition had no part, simply hamlet's question to the ghost. What may this mean that thou dead course, again incomplete steel, revilest thus the glimpses of the moon? That imagination which dilates the closest he writes into the world's dimension crowds it with agents in rank and order and quickly reduces the big reality to be the glimpses of the moon. These tricks of his magic spoil for us the illusions of the green room. Can any biography shed light on the localities into which the Midsummer Night's dream admits me? Did Shakespeare confide to any notary or parish recorder, sacriston or surrogate in Stratford the genesis of that delicate creation? The forest of Arden, the nimble air of scone castle, the moonlight of Portia's villa, the entre's vast and desert's idol of Othello's captivity? Where is the third cousin or grand nephew, the chancellor's file of accounts or private letter that has kept one word of those transcendent secrets? In fine, in this drama, as in all great works of art, in the Cyclopean architecture of Egypt and India, in the Fidian sculpture, the Gothic masters, the Italian painting, the ballads of Spain and Scotland, the genius draws up the latter after him, when the creative age goes up to heaven and gives way to a new age which sees the works and asks in vain for a history. Shakespeare is the only biographer of Shakespeare and even he can tell nothing except to the Shakespeare in us, that is to our most apprehensive and sympathetic hour. He cannot step from off his tripod and give us anecdotes of his inspirations. Read the antique documents extricated, analyzed and compared by the assiduous Dice and Collier, and now read one of these sky-y sentences, Areolites, which seem to have fallen out of heaven and which not your experience but the man within the breast has accepted as words of fate, and tell me if they match, if the former account in any manner for the latter, or which gives the most historical insight into the man. Hence, though our external history is so meager, yet with Shakespeare for biographer instead of Aubrey and Roe, we have really the information which is material, that which describes character and fortune, that which, if we were about to meet the man and deal with him, would most import us to know. We have his recorded convictions on those questions which knock for answer at every heart, on life and death, on love, on wealth and poverty, on the prizes of life and the ways whereby we come at them, on the characters of men and the influences occult and open which affect their fortunes, and on those mysterious and demoniacal powers which defy our science and yet which interweave their malice and their gift in our brightest hours. Who ever read the volume of the sonnet without finding that the poet had there revealed, under masks that are no masks to the intelligent, the lore of friendship and of love, the confusion of sentiments in the most susceptible and at the same time the most intellectual of men. What trait of his private mind has he hidden in his dramas? One can discern, in his ample pictures of the gentleman and the king, what forms and humanities pleased him. His delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful giving. Let Timon, let Warwick, let Antonio, the merchant, answer for his great heart. So far from Shakespeare's being the least known, he is the one person, in all modern history, known to us. What point of morals, of manners, of economy, of philosophy, of religion, of taste, of the conduct of life has he not settled? What mystery has he not signified his knowledge of? What office or function or district of man's work has he not remembered? What king has he not taught state as Talma taught Napoleon? What maiden has not found him finer than her delicacy? What lover has he not outloved? What sage has he not outseen? What gentleman has he not instructed in the rudeness of his behavior? Some able and appreciating critics think no criticism on Shakespeare valuable that does not rest purely on the dramatic merit, that he is falsely judged as poet and philosopher. I think as highly as these critics of his dramatic merit, but still think it secondary. He was a full man who liked to talk, a brain exhaling thoughts and images, which, seeking vent, found the drama next at hand. Had he been less, we should have had to consider how well he filled his place, how good a dramatist he was, and he is the best in the world. But it turns out that what he has to say is of that weight as to withdraw some attention from the vehicle, and he is like some saint whose history is to be rendered into all languages, into verse and prose, into songs and pictures, and cut up into proverbs, so that the occasion which gave the saints meaning the form of a conversation or of a prayer or of a code of laws is immaterial compared with the universality of its application. So it fares with the wise Shakespeare and his book of life. He wrote the heirs for all our modern music, he wrote the text of modern life, the text of manners, he drew the man of England and Europe, the father of the man in America, he drew the man and described the day and what is done in it. He reads the hearts of men and women, their probity and their second thought in wiles, the wiles of innocence and the transitions by which virtues and vices slide into their contraries. He could divide the mother's part from the father's part in the face of the child, or draw the fine demarcations of freedom and of fate. He knew the laws of repression which make the police of nature, and all the sweets and all the terrors of human lot lay in his mind as truly but as softly as the landscape lies on the eye. And the importance of this wisdom of life sinks the form, as of drama or epic, out of notice. Tis like making a question concerning the paper on which a king's message is written. Shakespeare is as much out of the category of eminent authors as he is out of the crowd. He is inconceivably wise, the others conceivably. A good reader can insort Nestle into Plato's brain and think from thence, but not into Shakespeare's. We are still out of doors. For executive faculty, for creation, Shakespeare is unique. No man can imagine it better. He was the farthest reach of subtlety, compatible with an individual self, the subtlest of authors, and only just within the possibility of authorship. With this wisdom of life is the equal endowment of imaginative and of lyric power. He clothed the creatures of his legend with form and sentiments, as if they were people who had lived under his roof. And few real men have left such distinct characters as these fictions. And they spoke in language as sweet as it was fit. Yet his talents never seduced him into an ostentation, nor did he harp on one string. An omnipresent humanity coordinates all his faculties. Give a man of talents a story to tell, and his partiality will presently appear. He has certain observations, opinions, topics, which have some accidental prominence, in which he disposes to all exhibit. He crams this part and starves that other part, consulting not the fitness of the thing, but his fitness and strength. But Shakespeare has no peculiarity, no importunate topic, but all is duly given. No veins, no curiosities, no cow painter, no bird fancier, no mannerist is he. He has no discoverable egotism. The great he tells greatly, the small subordinately. He is wise without emphasis or assertion. He is strong as nature is strong, who lifts the land into mountain slopes without effort, and by the same rule as she floats a bubble in the air, and likes as well to do one as the other. This makes that equality of power in farce, tragedy, narrative, and love songs, a merit so incessant that each reader is incredulous of the perception of other readers. This power of expression or of transferring the inmost truth of things into music and verse makes him the type of poet that has added a new problem to metaphysics. This is that which throws him into natural history as a main production of the globe, and as announcing new eras and ameliorations. Things were mirrored in his poetry without loss or blur. He could paint the fine with precision, the great with compass, the tragic and the comic indifferently, and without any distortion or favor. He carried his powerful execution into minute details to a hair point, finishes an eyelash or a dimple as firmly as he draws a mountain, and yet these, like natures, will bear the scrutiny of the solar microscope. In short, he is the chief example to prove that more or less of production, more or fewer pictures, is a thing indifferent. He had the power to make one picture. Daguer learned to let one flower etch its image on his plate of iodine, and then proceeds at leisure to etch a million. There are always objects, but there was never representation. Here is perfect representation, at last, and now let the world of figures sit for their portraits. No recipe can be given for the making of a Shakespeare, but the possibility of the translation of things into song is demonstrated. His lyric power lies in the genius of the piece. The sonnets, though their excellence is lost in the splendor of the dramas, are as inimitable as they. And it is not a merit of lines, but a total merit of the piece, like the tone of voice of some incomparable person. So is this a speech of poetic beings, and any clause is unproducible now as a whole poem. Though the speeches in the plays and the single lines have a beauty which tempts the ear to pause on them for their euphemism, yet the sentence is so loaded with meaning and so linked with its foregoers and followers that the logician is satisfied. His means are as admirable as his ends. Every subordinate invention, by which he helps himself to connect some irreconcilable opposites, is a poem too. He is not reduced to dismount and walk because his horses are running off with him in some distant direction. He always rides. The finest poetry was first experience, but the thought has suffered a transformation since it was an experience. Cultivated men often attain a good degree of skill in writing verses, but it is easy to read, through their poems, their personal history. Anyone acquainted with the parties can name every figure. This is Andrew and that is Rachel. The sense thus remains prosaic. It is a caterpillar with wings and not yet a butterfly. In the poet's mind the fact has gone quite over into a new element of thought and has lost all that is exuvial. This generosity abides with Shakespeare. We say, from the truth and closeness of his pictures, that he knows the lesson by heart, that there is not a trace of egotism. One more royal trait properly belongs to the poet. I mean his cheerfulness, without which no man can be a poet, for beauty is his aim. He loves virtue, not for its obligation, but for its grace. He delights in the world, in man and woman, for the lovely light that sparkles from them. Beauty, the spirit of joy and hilarity, he sheds over the universe. Epicurus relates that poetry has such charms that a lover might forsake his mistress to partake of them. And the true bards have been noted for their firm and cheerful temper. Homer lies in sunshine, Chaucer is glad and erect, and Soddy says, It was rumored abroad that I was penitent, but what had I to do with repentance? Not less sovereign and cheerful, much more sovereign and cheerful is the tone of Shakespeare. His name suggests joy and emancipation to the heart of men. If he should appear in any company of human souls, who would not march in his troop? He touches nothing that does not borrow health and longevity from his festival style. And now, how stands the account of man with his bard and benefactor? When in solitude, shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we seek to strike the balance. Solitude has austere lessons, it can teach us to spare both heroes and poets, and it weighs Shakespeare also and finds him to share the hafness and imperfection of humanity. Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer saw the splendor of meaning that plays over the visible world, knew that a tree had another use than for apples, and corn another than for meal, and the ball of the earth, then for tillage and roads, that these things bore a second and finer harvest to the mind, being emblems of its thoughts and conveying in all their natural history a certain mute commentary on human life. Shakespeare employed them as colors to compose his picture. He rested in their beauty and never took the step which seemed inevitable to such genius, namely to explore the virtue which resides in these symbols and imparts this power. What is that which they themselves say? He converted the elements which weighted on his command into entertainments. He was master of the revels to mankind. Is it not as if one should have, through majestic powers of science, the comments given into his hand, or the planets in their moons, and should draw them from their orbits to glare with the municipal fireworks on a holiday night and advertise in all towns, very superior pyrotechnique this evening? Are the agents of nature and the power to understand them worth no more than a street serenade or the breath of a cigar? One remembers again the trumpet text in the Quran, the heavens and the earth and all that is between them, think ye we have created them in jest. As long as the question is of talent and mental power the world of men has not his equal to show. But when the question is to life and its materials and its auxiliaries how does it profit me? What does it signify? It is but a twelfth night or midsummer night's dream or winter evening's tale. What signifies another picture more or less? The Egyptian verdict of the Shakespeare societies comes to mind that he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought. But this man, in wide contrast, had he been less, had he reached only the common measure of the great authors of Bacon, Milton, Tasso, Cervantes, we might leave the fact in the Twilight of Human Fate. But that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject that had ever existed and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into chaos, that he should not be wise for himself, it must even go into the world's history that the best poet led an obscure and profane life using his genius for the public amusement. Well, other men, priests and prophets, Israelites, German and Swede beheld the same objects. They also saw through them that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished, the red commandments, all excluding mountainous duty and obligation, a sadness as of piled mountains fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories of Adam's fall and curse behind us, with doomsday's and purgatorial and penal fires before us, and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener sank in them. It must be conceited that these are half views of half men. The world still wants its poet priest, a reconciler who shall not trifle with Shakespeare the player, nor shall grope engraves with Swedenborg the mourner, but who shall see, speak and act with equal inspiration. For knowledge will brighten the sunshine, right is more beautiful than private affection, and love is compatible with universal wisdom. Section 17 of Beacon Lights of History, Volume 13, Great Writers by John Lord. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Kay Hand. John Milton, Poet and Patriot Part 1. 1608-1674 by Tavis Babington Macaulay. Toward the close of the year 1823, Mr. Lemon, Deputy Keeper of the State Papers, in the course of his researches among the presses of his office, met with a large Latin manuscript. With it were found corrected copies of the foreign dispatches written by Milton while he filled the Office of Secretary, and several papers relating to the Popish Trials and the Ryehouse plot. The whole was wrapped up in an envelope subscribed to Mr. Skinner Merchant. On examination the large manuscript proved to be the long lost essay on the doctrines of Christianity, which according to Wood and Toland, Milton finished after the Restoration and deposited with Syriac Skinner. Skinner it is well known held the same political opinions with his illustrious friend. It is therefore probable, as Mr. Lemon conjectures, that he may have fallen under the suspicions of the government during that persecution of the Whigs which followed the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament. In that, in consequence of a general seizure of his papers, this work may have been brought to the office in which it has been found. But whatever the adventures of the manuscript may have been, no doubt can exist that it is a genuine relic of the great poet. The book itself will not add much to the fame of Milton, were it far more orthodox or far more heretical than it is, it would not much edify or corrupt the present generation. The men of our time are not to be converted or perverted by courtes. A few more days and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf. The name of its author and the remarkable circumstances attending its publication will secure to it a certain degree of attention. For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing room and a few columns in every magazine, and it will then, to borrow the elegant language of the playbills, be withdrawn to make room for the forthcoming novelties. We wish, however, to avail ourselves of the interest transient as it may be which this work has excited. The dexterous Capuchins never chose to preach on the life and miracles of a saint till they have awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors by exhibiting some relic of him, a thread of his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his blood. On the same principle we intend to take advantage of the late interesting discovery, and while this memorial of a great and good man is still in the hands of all, to say something of his moral and intellectual qualities. Nor we are convinced, while the severest of our readers blame us, if on occasion, like the present, we turn for a short time from the topics of the day to commemorate, in all love and reverence, the genius and virtues of John Milton, the poet, the statesman, the philosopher, the glory of English literature, the champion, and martyr of English liberty. It is by his poetry that Milton is best known, and it is of his poetry that we wish first to speak. By the general suffrage of the civilized world his place has been assigned among the greatest masters of the art. His detractors, however, though outvoted, have not been silenced. There are many critics and some of great name who can thrive in the same breath to extol the poems and to decry the poet. The works they acknowledge considered in themselves may be classed among the noblest productions of the humankind, but they will not allow the author to rank with those great men who, born in the infancy of civilization, supplied by their own powers the want of instruction, and though destitute models of themselves bequeathed to posterity models which defy imitation. Milton, in his said, inherited what his predecessors created, he lived in an enlightened age, he received a finished education, and we must therefore, if we would form a just estimate of his powers, make large deductions in consideration of these advantages. We venture to say, on the contrary, paradoxical as the remark may appear, that no poet has ever had to struggle with more unfavorable circumstances than Milton. He doubted, as he himself owned, whether he had not been born an age too late. For this notion, Johnson has thought fit to make him the butt of much clumsy ridicule. The poet, we believe, understood the nature of his art better than the critic. He knew that his poetical genius derived no advantage from the civilization which surrounded him, or from the learning which he had acquired, and he looked back with something like regret to the ruder age of simple words and vivid impressions. We think that, as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines. Therefore, though we fervently admire those great works of imagination which have appeared in Dark Ages, we do not admire them the more because they have appeared in Dark Ages. On the contrary, we hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age. We cannot understand why those who believe in that most orthodox article of literary faith, that the earliest poets are generally the best, should wonder at the rule as if it were the exception. Surely the uniformity of the phenomenon indicates a corresponding uniformity in the cause. The fact is that common observers reason from the progress of the experimental sciences to that of the imitative arts. The improvement of the former is gradual and slow. Ages are spent in collecting materials. Age is more in separating and combining them. Even when a system has been formed, there is still something to add to alter or to reject. Every generation enjoys the use of a vast horde bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that horde, augmented by fresh acquisitions to future ages. In these pursuits, therefore, the first speculators lie under great disadvantages, and even when they fail, are entitled to praise. They are pupils with far inferior intellectual powers, speedily surpass them in actual attainments. Every girl who has read Mrs. Marce's little dialogues on political economy could teach Montague or Walpole many lessons in finance. Any intelligent man may now, by resolutely applying himself for a few years to mathematics, learn more than the great Newton knew after half a century of study and meditation. But it is not thus with music, with painting or with sculpture, still less is it thus with poetry. The progress of refinement rarely supplies these arts with better objects of imitation. It may indeed improve the instruments which are necessary to the mechanical operations of the musician, the sculptor and the painter, but language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence, the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical. That of a half-civilized people is poetical. This change in the language of men is partly the cause and partly the effect of a corresponding change in the nature of their intellectual operations, of a change by which science gains and poetry loses. Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge, but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion, as men know more and think more, they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems. They give us vague phrases instead of images and personified qualities instead of men. They may be better able to analyze human nature than their predecessors. But analysis is not the business of the poet. His office is to portray, not to dissect. He may believe in a moral sense, like Shaftesbury. He may refer all human actions to self-interest like Hevelticus. Or he may never think about matter at all. His creed on sub-subjects will no more influence his poetry, properly so-called, than the notions which a painter may have conceived respecting the lacrimal glands or the circulation of the blood will affect the tears of his neoby or the blushes of his aurora. If Shakespeare had written a book on the motives of human actions, it is by no means certain that it would have been a good one. It is extremely improbable that it would have contained half so much able reasoning on the subject as is to be found in the fable of the bees. But could Mandeville have created an Iago? Well, as he knew how to resolve characters into their elements, would he have been able to combine those elements in such a manner as to make a man a real living individual man? Perhaps no person can be a poet or can even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind, if anything which gives so much pleasure ought to be called unsoundness. By poetry we mean not all writing in verse, nor even all good writing in verse. Our definition excludes many metrical compositions which on other grounds deserve the highest praise. By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colors. Thus the greatest of poets has described it, in lines universally admired for the vigor and felicity of their diction, and still more valuable on account of the just notion which they convey of the art in which he excelled. As imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet's pen turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. These are the fruits of the fine frenzy which he ascribes to the poet, a fine frenzy doubtless, but still a frenzy. Truth indeed is essential to poetry, but it is the truth of madness. The reasonings are just, but the premises are false. After the first suppositions have been made everything ought to be consistent, but those first suppositions require a degree of credulity which almost amounts to a partial and temporary derangement of the intellect. Hence of all people children are the most imaginative. They abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion. Every image which is strongly presented to their mental eye produces on them the effect of reality. No man, whatever his sensibility may be, is ever affected by Hamlet or Lear as a little girl is affected by the story of poor red riding hood. She knows that it is all false, that wolves cannot speak, that there are no wolves in England. Yet in spite of her knowledge she believes, she weeps, she trembles, she dares not go into a dark room lest she should feel the teeth of the monster at her throat. Such is the despotism of the imagination of her uncultivated mind. In a rude state of society men are children with a greater variety of ideas. It is therefore in such a state of society that we may expect to find the poetical temperament in its highest perfection. In an enlightened age there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy, abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit and eloquence, abundance of verses, and even of good ones, but little poetry. Men will judge and compare, but they will not create. They will talk about the old poets and comment on them, and to a certain degree enjoy them, but they will scarcely be able to conceive the effect which poetry produced on their root or ancestors, the agony, the ecstasy, the plentitude of belief. The Greek rhapsodists, according to Plato, could scarce recite Homer without falling into convulsions. The Mohawk hardly feels the scalping knife while he shouts his death song. The power which the ancient bards of Wales and Germany exercised over their auditors seems, to modern readers, almost miraculous. Such feelings are very rare in civilized community, and most rare among those who participate most in its improvements. They linger longest among the peasantry. Poetry produces an illusion on the eye of the mind as a magic lantern produces an illusion on the eye of the body. And as the magic lantern acts best in a dark room, poetry affects its purpose most completely in a dark age. As the light of knowledge breaks in on its exhibitions, as the outlines of certainty become more and more definite, and the shades of probability more and more distinct, the hues and lineaments of the phantoms which the poet calls upon grows fainter and fainter. We cannot unite the incompatible advantages of reality and deception, the clear discernment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction. He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has, perhaps, constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority. His very talents will be a hindrance to him. His difficulties will be proportioned to his proficiency in the pursuits which are fashionable among his contemporaries. And that proficiency, in general, will be proportioned to the vigor and activity of his mind. And it is well, if after all his sacrifices and exertions, his works do not resemble a lisping man or a modern ruin. We have seen in our own time great talents, intense labor, and long meditation employed in this struggle against the spirit of the age. And employed, we will not say absolutely in vain, but with dubious success and feeble applause. If these reasonings be just, no poet has ever triumphed over greater difficulties than Milton. He received a learned education. He was a profound and elegant classical scholar. He had studied all the mysteries of rabbinical literature. He was intimately acquainted with every language in modern Europe from which either pleasure or information was then to be derived. He was perhaps the only poet of later times who has been distinguished by the excellence of his Latin verse. The genius of Petrarch was scarcely of the first order, and his poems in the ancient language, though much praised by those who have never read them, are wretched compositions. Cowley, with all his admirable wit and ingenuity, had little imagination, nor indeed do we think his classical diction comparable to that of Milton. The authority of Johnson is against us on this point, but Johnson had studied the bad writers of the Middle Ages till he had become utterly insensible to the Augustan elegance, and was as ill-qualified to judge between two Latin styles as an habitual drunkard to set up for a wine taster. Versification in a dead language is an exotic, a far-fetched, costly, sickly imitation of that which elsewhere may be found in helpful and spontaneous perfection. The soils on which this rarity flourishes are in general as ill-suited to the production of vigorous native poetry as the flower pots of a hot house to the growth of oaks. That the author of The Paradise Lost should have written the epistle to Manso was truly wonderful. Never before were such market originality and such exquisite mimicry found together. Indeed, in all the Latin poems of Milton, the artificial manner indispensable to such works is admirably preserved, while at the same time his genius gives to them a peculiar charm and air of nobleness and freedom, which distinguishes them from all other writings of the same class. They remind us of the amusements of those angelic warriors who composed the cohort of Gabriel. About him exercised heroic games, the unarmed youth of heaven, but o'er their heads celestial armory, shield, helm, and spear hung high, with diamond flaming and with gold. We cannot look upon the sportive exercises for which the genius of Milton unguards itself without catching a glimpse of the gorgeous and terrible panoply which it is accustomed to wear. The strength of his imagination triumphed over every obstacle. So intense and ardent was the fire of his mind that it not only was not suffocated beneath the weight of fuel, but penetrated the whole super incumbent mass with its own heat and radiance. It is not our intention to attempt anything like a complete examination of the poetry of Milton. The public has long been agreed as to the merit of the most remarkable passages, the incomparable harmony of the numbers, and the excellence of that style which no rival has been able to equal and no parodist to degrade, which displays in their highest perfection the idiomatic power of the English tongue, and to which every ancient and every modern language has contributed something of grace, of energy, or of music. In the vast field of criticism on which we are entering, innumerable reapers have already put their sickles. Yet the harvest is so abundant that the negligent search of a straggling gleaner may be rewarded with a sheaf. The most striking characteristic of the poetry of Milton is the extreme remoteness of the associations by means of which it acts on the readers. Its effect is produced not so much by what it expresses as by what it suggests, not so much by the ideas which it directly conveys as by other ideas which are connected with them. He electrifies the mind through conductors. The most unimaginative man must understand the Iliad. Homer gives him no choice and requires from him no exertion, but takes the hole upon himself and sets the images in so clear a light that it is impossible to be blind to them. The works of Milton cannot be comprehended or enjoyed unless the mind of the reader co-operates with that of the writer. He does not paint a finished picture or a play for a mere passive listener. He sketches and leaves others to fill up the outline. He strikes the keynote and expects his hearer to make out the melody. We often hear of the magical influence of poetry. The expression in general means nothing, but applied to the writings of Milton, it is most appropriate. His poetry acts like an incantation. Its merit lies less in its obvious meaning than in its occult power. There would seem at first sight to be no more in his words than in other words, but they are words of enchantment. No sooner are they pronounced than the past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty start at once into existence and all the burial places of the memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the sentence, substitute one synonym for another and the whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself as mistaken as Cassim in The Arabian Tale when he stood crying open wheat, open barley to the door that obeyed no sound but open sesame. The miserable failure of Dryden in his attempt to translate into his own diction some parts of the Paradise Lost is a remarkable instance of this. In support of these observations we may remark that scarcely any passages in the poems of Milton are more generally known or more frequently repeated than those which are little more than muster roles of names. They are not always more appropriate or more melodious than other names, but they are charmed names. Every one of them is the first link in a long chain of associated ideas. Like the dwelling place of our infancy revisited in manhood, like the song of our country heard in a strange land, they produce upon us and affect wholly independent of their intrinsic value. One transports us back to a remote period of history, another places us among the novel scenes in manners of a distant region. A third evokes all the dear classical recollections of childhood, the schoolroom, the dog-eared Virgil, the holiday, and the prize. A fourth brings before us the splendid phantoms of a chivalrous romance, the trophied lists, the embroidered housings, the quaint devices, the haunted forests, the enchanted gardens, the achievements of enamored knights, and the smiles of rescued princesses. In none of the works of Milton is his peculiar manner more happily displayed than in the Allegro and the Pensaroso. It is impossible to conceive that the mechanism of language can be brought to a more exquisite degree of perfection. These poems differ from others as Otar of Roses differs from ordinary rosewater, the close-packed essence from the thin diluted mixture. They are indeed not so much poems as collections of hints, from each of which the reader is to make out a poem for himself. Every epithet is a text for a stanza. The comos and the samson agonists are works which, though a very different merit, offer some market points of resemblance. Both are lyric poems in the form of place. There are perhaps no two kinds of compositions so essentially dissimilar as the drama and the ode. The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings the illusion is broken. The effect is as unpleasant as that which is produced on the stage by the voice of a prompter or the entrance of a scene shifter. Hence it was that the tragedies of Byron were his least successful performances. They resembled those pasteboard pictures invented by the friends of children, Mr. Newberry, in which a single movable head goes round twenty different bodies so that the same face looks out upon us successfully, for the uniform of a hussar, the furs of a judge, and the rags of a beggar. In all the characters, patriots and tyrants, haters and lovers, the frown and sneer of Harold were discernible in an instant. But this species of egotism, though fatal to the drama, is the inspiration of the ode. It is the part of the lyric poet to abandon himself without reserve to his own emotions. Between these hostile elements, many great men have endeavored to effect an amalgamation, but never with complete success. The Greek drama, on the model of which the Samson was written, sprang from the ode. The dialogue was engrafted on the chorus and naturally partook of its character. The genius of the greatest of the Athenian dramatists cooperated with the circumstances under which tragedy made its first appearance. Escalus was, head and heart, a lyric poet. In his time the Greeks had far more intercourse with the East than in the days of Homer, and they had not yet acquired that immense superiority in war, in science, and in the arts, which in the following generation led them to treat the Asiatics with contempt. From the narrative of Herodotus it should seem that they still looked up, with the veneration of disciples, to Egypt and Assyria. At this period accordingly it was natural that the literature of Greece should be tinctured with the Oriental style. And that style we think is discernible in the works of Pindar and Escalus. The latter often reminds us of the Hebrew writers. The book of Job indeed, in conduct and diction, bears a considerable resemblance to some of his dramas. Considered as plays, his works are absurd. Considered as choruses, they are above all praise. If, for instance, we examine the address of Clytemnestra to Agamemnon on his return, or the description of the seven Argyve chiefs by the principles of dramatic writing, we shall instantly condemn them as monstrous. But if we forget the characters and think only of the poetry, we shall admit that it has never been surpassed in energy and magnificence. Sophocles made the Greek drama as dramatic as was consistent with its original form. His portraits of men have a sort of similarity. But it is the similarity not of a painting, but of a boss relief. It suggests a resemblance, but it does not produce an illusion. Euripides attempted to carry the reform further, but it was a task far beyond his powers, perhaps beyond any powers. Instead of correcting what was bad, he destroyed what was excellent. He substituted crutches for stilts, bad sermons for good odes. Milton and his well-known admired Euripides highly, much more highly than, in our opinion, Euripides deserved. Indeed, the caresses, which this partiality leads our countryman to bestow on sad, electrous poet, sometimes reminds us of the beautiful Queen of Fairyland kissing the long ears of Bottom. At all events, there can be no doubt that this veneration for the Athenian, whether just or not, was injurious to the Samson Agonestes. Had Milton taken Escalus for his model, he wouldn't have given himself up to the lyric inspiration and poured out profusely all the treasures of his mind, without bestowing a thought on those dramatic properties which the nature of the work rendered it impossible to preserve. In the attempt to reconcile things in their own nature, inconsistent he has failed, as everyone else must have failed. We cannot identify ourselves with the characters as in a good play. We cannot identify ourselves with the poet as in a good ode. The conflicting ingredients, like an acid and an alkali mixed, neutralize each other. We are by no means insensible to the merits of this celebrated piece to the severe dignity of the style, the graceful and pathetic solemnity of the opening speech, or the wild and barbaric melody which gives so striking an effect to the choral passages. But we think it, we confess, the least successful effort of the genius of Milton. Section 18 of Beacon Lines of History Volume 13, Great Writers by John Mord. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Kay Hand. John Milton, Poet and Patriot, Part 2. The commousse is framed on the model of the Italian mask as the Samson is framed on the model of the Greek tragedy. It is certainly the noblest performance of the kind which exists in any language. It is as far superior to the faithful shepherdess as the faithful shepherdess is to the aminta, or the aminta to the pastor fido. It was well for Milton that he had here no Euripides to mislead him. He understood and loved the literature of modern Italy, but he did not feel for it the same veneration which he entertained for the remains of Athenian and Roman poetry, consecrated by so many lofty and endearing recollections. The faults, moreover, of his Italian predecessors were of a kind to which his mind had a deadly antipathy. He could stoop to a plain style, sometimes even to a bald style, but false brilliancy was his utter aversion. His muse had no objection to a russet attire, but she turned with disgust from the finery of Guarini as tawdry and as paltry as the rags of a chimney sweeper on Mayday. Whatever ornaments she wears are of massive gold, not only dazzling to the sight, but capable of standing the severest test of the crucible. Milton attended in the Comus to the distinction which he afterward neglected in the Samson. He made his mask what it ought to be, essentially lyrical and dramatic only in semblance. He has not attempted a fruitless struggle against a defect inherent in the nature of that species of composition, and he is therefore succeeded wherever success was not impossible. The speeches must be read as majestic soliloquies, and he who so reads them will be enraptured with their eloquence, their sublimity, and their music. The interruptions of the dialogue, however, impose a constraint upon the writer and break the illusion of the reader. The finest passages are those which are lyric in form as well as in spirit. I should much commend, says the excellent Sir Henry Watten in a letter to Milton, the tragical part if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain dory delicacy in your songs and odes, whereon too I must plainly confess to you, I have seen yet nothing parallel in our language. The criticism was just. It is when Milton escapes from the shackles of the dialogue, when he is discharged from the labor of uniting two incongruous styles, when he is at liberty to indulge his choral raptures without reserve, that he rises even above himself. Then, like his own good genius bursting from the earthly form and weeds of theorces, he stands forth in celestial freedom and beauty. He seems to cry exultantly. Now my task is smoothly done. I can fly or I can run. To skim the earth, to soar above the clouds, to bathe in the Elysian dew of the rainbow and to inhale the balmy smells of Nard and Cassia, which the musky winds of the Zephyr scatter through the cedar alleys of the Hesperides. There are several of the minor poems of Milton on which we would willingly make a few remarks. Still more willingly would we enter into a detailed examination of that admirable poem, The Paradise Regained, which, strangely enough, is scarcely ever mentioned except as an instance of the blindness of the parental affection which men of letters bear toward the offspring of their intellect. That Milton was mistaken in preferring this work, excellent as it is, to the Paradise Lost, we readily admit. But we are sure that the superiority of the Paradise Lost to The Paradise Regained is not more decided than the superiority of The Paradise Regained to every poem which has since made its appearance. Our limits, however, prevent us from discussing the point at length. We hasten on to that extraordinary production which the general suffrage of critics has placed in the highest class of human compositions. The only poem of modern times which can be compared with The Paradise Lost is the Divine Comedy. The subject of Milton in some points resembled that of Dante, but he has treated it in a widely different manner. We cannot, we think, better illustrate our opinion respecting our own great poet than by contrasting him with the father of Tuscan literature. The poetry of Milton differs from that of Dante as the hieroglyphics of Egypt differed from the picture writing of Mexico. The images which Dante employs speaks for themselves. They stand simply for what they are. Those of Milton have a signification which is often discernible only to the initiated. Their value depends less on what they directly represent than what on they remotely suggest. However strange, however grotesque may be the appearance which Dante undertakes to describe, he never shrinks from describing it. He gives us the shape, the color, the sound, the smell, the taste. He counts the numbers he measures the size. His similes are the illustrations of a traveler. Unlike those of other poets and especially of Milton, they are introduced in a plain business-like manner, not for the sake of any beauty in the objects from which they are drawn, not for the sake of any ornament which they may impart to the poem, but simply in order to make the meaning of the writer as clear to the reader as it is to himself. The ruins of the precipice which led from the sixth to the seventh circle of hell were like those of the rock which fell into the adige on the south of Trent. The cataract of Phlegathon was like that of Aquaceta at the monastery of St. Benedict. The place where the heretics work and find in burning tombs resembled the vast cemetery of Arles. Now let us compare with the exact details of Dante, the dim imitations of Milton. We will cite a few examples. The English poet has never thought of taking the measure of Satan. He gives us merely a vague idea, a vast bulk. In one passage the fiend lies stretched out, huge in length, floating many a rude, equal in size to the earth-born enemies of Jove, or to the sea monster which the mariner mistakes for an island. When he addresses himself to battle against the guardian angels, he stands like Teneriff or Atlas. His stature reaches the sky. Contrast with these descriptions the lines in which Dante has described the gigantic specter of Nimrod. His face seemed to me as long and as broad as the ball of St. Peter's at Rome and his other limbs were in proportion, so that the bank which concealed him from the waist downwards nevertheless showed so much of him that three tall Germans would in vain have attempted to reach his hair. We are sensible that we do know justice to the admirable style of the Florentine poet, but Mr. Carey's translation is not at hand and our version, however rude, is sufficient to illustrate our meaning. Once more compare the Laser House in the eleventh book of the Paradise Sloss with the last word of Malibulge in Dante. Milton avoids the loathsome details and takes refuge in indistinct but solemn and tremendous imagery, despair hurring from couch to couch to mock the wretches with his attendants, death shaking his dart over them, but in spite of supplications delaying the strike. What says Dante? There was such a moan there as there would be if all the sick, who between July and September, are in the hospitals of Valda Chiana, and of the Tuscan swamps and of Sardinia were in one pit together, and such a stench was issuing forth as his wants to issue from decayed limbs. We will not take upon ourselves the invidious office of settling precedency between two such writers. Each at his own department is incomparable, and each we may remark has wisely, or fortunately, taken a subject adapted to exhibit his peculiar talent to the greatest advantage. The Divine Comedy is a personal narrative. Dante is the eyewitness and ear witness of that which he relates. He is the very man who has heard the tormented spirits crying out for the second death, who has read the dusky characters on the portal within which there is no hope, who has hidden his face from the terrors of the Gorgon, who has fled from the hooks and the seething pitch of Babaricchia and Drozignazo. His own hands have grasped the shaggy sides of Lucifer. His own feet have climbed the mountain of expiation. His own brow has been marked by the purifying angel. The reader would throw aside such a tale and incredulous disgust, unless it were told with the strongest air of veracity, with a sobriety even in its horrors, with the greatest precision and multiplicity in its details. The narrative of Milton in this respect differs from that of Dante, as the adventures of Amatus differ from those of Gulliver. The author of Amatus would have made his book ridiculous if he had introduced those minute particulars which give such a charm to the work of Swift. The nautical observations, the effected delicacy about names, the official documents transcribed at full length, and all the unmeaning gossip and scandal of the court, springing out of nothing and tending to nothing. We are not shocked at being told that a man who lived, nobody knows when, saw many very strange sites, and we can easily abandon ourselves to the illusion of the romance. But when Lemuel Gulliver, surgeon, resident at Rotherhith, tells us of pygmies and giants, flying islands, and philosophizing horses, nothing but such circumstantial touches could produce for a single moment a deception on the imagination. Of all the poets who have introduced into their works the agency of supernatural beings, Milton has succeeded best. Here, Dante decidedly yields to him, and as this is a point on which many rash and ill considered judgments have been pronounced, we feel inclined to dwell on it a little longer. The most fatal error, which a poet can possibly commit in the management of his machinery, is that of attempting to philosophize too much. Milton has often been censured for ascribing to spirits many functions of which spirits must be incapable. But these objections, though sanctioned by eminent names, originate, we venture to say, in profound ignorance of the art of poetry. What is spirit? What are our own minds, the portion of spirit with which we are best acquainted? We observe certain phenomena. We cannot explain them into material causes. We therefore infer that there exists something which is not material. But of this something we have no idea. We can define it only by negatives. We can reason about it only by symbols. We use the word but we have no image of the thing. And the business of poetry is with images and not with words. The poet uses words indeed, but they are merely the instruments of his art, not its objects. They are the materials which he is to dispose in such a manner as to present a picture to the mental eye. And if they are not so disposed, they are no more entitled to be called poetry than a bale of canvas and a box of colors to be called a painting. Logicians may reason about abstractions, but the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle. The first inhabitants of Greece, there is reason to believe, worshipped one invisible deity. But the necessity of having something more definite to adore produced, in a few centuries, the innumerable crowd of gods and goddesses. In like manner the ancient Persians thought it impious to exhibit the creator under a human form. Yet even these transferred to the sun with the worship which, in speculation, they considered due only to the supreme mind. The history of the Jews is the record of a continued struggle between pure theism supported by the most terrible sanctions and the strangely fascinating desire of having some visible intangible object of adoration. Perhaps none of the secondary causes which Gibbon has assigned for the rapidity with which Christianity spread over the world, while Judaism scarcely ever acquired a proselyte, operated more powerfully than this feeling. God, the uncreated, the incomprehensible, the invisible, attracted few worshippers. A philosopher might admire so noble a conception, but the crowd turned away and discussed from words which presented no image to their minds. It was before deity embodied in a human form walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of the synagogue and the doubts of the academy and the pride of the portico, and the fascies of the lictor and the swords of 30 legions were humbled in the dust. Soon after Christianity had achieved its triumph, the principle which had assisted it began to corrupt it. It became a new paganism. Patron saints assumed the offices of household gods. Saint George took the place of Mars. Saint Elmo consoled the mariner for the loss of Castor and Pollux. The Virgin Mother and Cecilia succeeded to venus and the muses. The fascination of sex and loveliness was again joined to that of celestial dignity, and the homage of chivalry was blended with that of religion. Reformers have often made a stand against these feelings, but never with more than apparent and partial success. The man who demolished the images in cathedrals have not always been able to demolish those which were enshrined in their minds. It would not be difficult to show that in politics, the same rule holds good. Doctrines, we are afraid, most generally be embodied before they can excite a strong public feeling. The multitude is more easily interested for the most unmeaning badge or the most insignificant name than for the most important principle. From these considerations we infer that no poet who should affect that metaphysical accuracy for the want of which Milton has been blamed would escape a disgraceful failure. Still, however, there was another extreme, which, though far less dangerous, was also to be avoided. The imaginations of men are in a great measure under the control of their opinions. The most exquisite art of poetical coloring can produce no illusion when it is employed to represent that which is at once perceived to be incongruous and absurd. Milton wrote in an age of philosophers and theologians, it was necessary therefore for him to abstain from giving such a shock to their understandings as might break the charm for which it was his object to throw over their imaginations. This is the real explanation of the indistinctness and inconsistency with which he has often been reproached. Dr. Johnson acknowledges that it was absolutely necessary that the spirit should be clothed with material forms. But, says he, the poet should have secured the consistency of his system by keeping immateriality out of sight and seducing the reader to drop it from his thoughts. This is easily said, but what if Milton could not seduce his readers to drop immateriality from their thoughts? What if the contrary opinion had taken so full a possession of the minds of men as to leave no room even for the half-belief which poetry requires? Such we suspect to have been the case. It was impossible for the poet to adopt altogether the material or the immaterial system. He therefore took his stand on the debatable ground. He left the whole in ambiguity. He has doubtless, by so doing, laid himself open to the charge of inconsistency. But, though philosophically in the wrong, we cannot but believe that he was poetically in the right. This task, which almost any other writer would have found impracticable, was easy to him. The peculiar art which he possessed of communicating his meaning circuitously through a long succession of associated ideas, and of intimating more than he expressed, enabled him to disguise his incongruities which he could not avoid. Poetry which relates to the beings of another world ought to be at once mysterious and picturesque. That of Milton is so. That of Dante is picturesque indeed beyond any that ever was written. Its effect approaches to that produced by the pencil or the chisel. But it is picturesque to the exclusion of all mystery. There is a fault on the right side, a fault inseparable from the plan of Dante's poem, which as we have already observed rendered the utmost accuracy of description necessary. Still it is a fault. The supernatural agents excite an interest, but it is not the interest which is proper to supernatural agents. We feel that we could talk to the ghosts and demons without any emotion of unearthly awe. We could, like D'Ahuan, ask them to supper and eat heartily in their company. Dante's angels are our good men with wings. His devils are spiteful, ugly executioners. His dead men are merely living men in strange situations. The scene which passes between the poet and Farinata is justly celebrated. Still Farinata in the burning tomb is exactly what Farinata would have been at an auto-defe. Nothing can be more touching than the first interview of Dante and Beatrice. Yet what is it but a lovely woman chiding with sweet austere composure, the lover for whose affection she is grateful, but whose vices she reprobates? The feelings which give the passage its charm would suit the streets of Florence as well as the summit of the Mount of Purgatory. The spirits of Milton are unlike those of almost all other writers. His fiends in particular are wonderful creations. They are not metaphysical abstractions. They are not wicked men. They are not ugly beasts. They have no horns, no tails, none of the feefall foam of tasso and clopstock. They have just enough in common with human nature to be intelligible to human beings. Their characters are, like their forms, marked by a certain dim resemblance to those of men, but exaggerated to gigantic dimensions and veiled in mysterious gloom. Perhaps the gods and demons of Escalus may best bear a comparison with the angels and devils of Milton. The style of the Athenian had, as we have remarked, something of the Oriental character, and the same peculiarity may be traced in his mythology. It is nothing of the amenity and elegance which we generally find in the superstitions of Greece, all as rugged, barbaric, and colossal. The legends of Escalus seem to harmonize less with the fragrant groves and graceful porticoes in which his countrymen paid their vows to the god of light and goddess of desire, than with those huge and grotesque labyrinths of eternal granite in which Egypt enshried her mystic Osiris, or in which Hindustan still bows down to her seven-headed idols. His favorite gods are those of the elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth, compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and an upstart, the gigantic titans and the inexorable furies. Foremost among his creations of this class stands Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, the friend of man, the sullen and implacable enemy of heaven. Prometheus bears undoubtedly a considerable resemblance to the Satan of Milton. In both we find the same impatience of control, the same ferocity, the same unconquerable pride. In both characters also are mingled, though in very different proportions, the same kind of generous feelings. Prometheus, however, is hardly superhuman enough. He talks too much of his chains and his uneasy posture. He is rather too much depressed and agitated. His resolution seems to depend on the knowledge which he possesses that he holds the fate of his torturer in his hands and that the hour of his release will surely come. But Satan is a creature of another sphere. The might of his intellectual nature is victorious over the extremity of pain. Amidst agonies which cannot be conceived without horror, he deliberates, resolves, and even exalts. Against the sword of Michael, against the thunder of Jehovah, against the flaming lake, and the moral burning with solid fire, against the prospect of an eternity of unintermitted misery, his spirit bears up unbroken, resting on its own innate energies, requiring no support from anything external nor even from hope itself. To return for a moment to the parallel which we have been attempting to draw between Milton and Dante, we would add that the poetry of these great men has in a considerable degree taken its character from their moral qualities. They are not egotists. They rarely obtrude their idiosyncrasies on their readers. They have nothing in common with those modern beggars for fame who extort a pittance from the compassion of the inexperienced by exposing the nakedness and sores of their minds. Yet it would be difficult to name two writers whose works have been more completely, though undesignedly, colored by their personal feelings. The character of Milton was peculiarly distinguished by loftiness of spirits and that of Dante by intensity of feeling. In every line of the divine comedy we discern the asperity which is produced by pride struggling with misery. There is perhaps no work in the world so deeply and uniformly sorrowful. The melancholy of Dante was no fantastic caprice. It was not, as far as at this distance of time can be judged, the effect of external circumstances. It was from within. Neither love or glory, neither the conflicts of earth nor the hope of heaven could dispel it. It turned every consolation and every pleasure into its own nature. It resembled that noxious, sardinian soil of which the intense bitterness is said to have been perceptible even in its honey. His mind was, in the noble language of the Hebrew poet, a land of darkness as darkness itself and where the light was as darkness. The gloom of his character discolors all the passions of men and all the face of nature and tinges with its own livid hue the flowers of paradise and the glories of the eternal throne. All the portraits of him are singularly characteristic. No person can look on the features, noble even to ruggedness, the dark furrows of the cheek, the haggard and woeful stare of the eye, the sullen and contemptuous curve of the lip, and doubt that they belong to a man too proud and too sensitive to be happy. Milton was, like Dante, a statement and a lover and, like Dante, he had been unfortunate in ambition and in love. He had survived his health and his sight, the comforts of his home, and the prosperity of his party. Of the great men by whom he had been distinguished at his entrance into life, some had been taken away from the evil to come, some had carried into foreign climates their unconquerable hatred of oppression, some were pining in dungeons, and some had poured forth their blood on scaffolds. Vanall and licentious scribblers with just sufficient talent to clothe the thoughts of a pander in the style of a bellman, were now the favorite writers of the sovereign and of the public. It was a loathsome herd, which could be compared to nothing so fitly as to the rabble of Comus, grotesque monsters, half bestial, half human, dripping with wine bloated with gluttony and reeling in obscene dances. Amidst these that fair muse was placed, like the chaste lady of the mask, lofty, spotless and serene, to be chattered at and pointed at and grinned at by the whole route of saders and goblins. If ever despondency and asperity could be excused in any man, they might have been excused in Milton. But the strength of his mind overcame every calamity, neither blindness nor gout, nor age, nor penury, nor domestic afflictions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor prescription, nor neglect, had power to disturb his sedate and majestic patients. His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they were singularly equitable. His temper was serious, perhaps stern, but it was a temper which no sufferings could render sullen or frepful. Such as it was when, on the eve of great events, he returned from his travels in the prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with literary distinctions and glowing with patriotic hopes, such it continued to be, after having experienced every calamity which is incident to our nature, bold, poor, sightless and disgraced, he retired to his hovel to die. Hence it was, that though he wrote the Paradise Lost at a time of life when images of beauty and tenderness are in general beginning to fade, even from those minds in which they have not been effaced by anxiety and disappointment, he adorned it with all that is most lovely and delightful in the physical and in the moral world. Neither theocratists nor Aristot had a finer or more helpful sense of the pleasantness of external objects, or loved better to luxuriate amidst sunbeams and flowers, the songs of nightingales, the juice of summer fruits, and the coolness of shady fountains. His conception of love unites all the voluptuousness of the oriental harem, and all the gallantry of the chivalric tournament with all the pure and quiet affection of an English fireside. His poetry reminds us of the miracles of Alpine scenery. Nooks and dowls, beautiful as fairyland, are embosomed in its most rugged and gigantic elevations. The roses and myrtles bloom unchilled on the verge of an avalanche.