Encroaching Eve, perhaps, had first the rule

Of high Olympus, thence by Saturn driven

And Ops, e'er yet Dictaan Jove was born.--Book x.

Of all his pauses, however, Johnson preferred that upon the sixth syllable, and passages concluding at this stop, he said, he could never read without strong emotions of delight or admiration. Of this rest the following are specimens:

Before the hills appeared, or fountain flowed,
Thou with th' Eternal wisdom didst converse,
Wisdom thy sister; and with her didst play
In presence of the Almighty Father, pleased
With thy celestial song.

Or other worlds they seemed, or happy isles,
Like those Hesperian gardens famed of old,
Fortunate fields, and groves, and flow'ry vales.
Thrice happy isles! but who dwelt happy there,
He staid not to inquire.

Surrey not only adapted the majestic notes of blank verse to an epic theme; he added also another string to our lyre by the introduction of the sonnet. He found a model in Petrarch, and Milton in Dante; but Sir Egerton Brydges confesses his inferiority to his master. Among

* "True musical delight," says Milton, "consists in apt numbers, fit quantities of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another." By apt numbers, I understand that accommodation of the sound to the sense which Pope's hackneyed line has made familiar as one of the rules of criticism. Perhaps no man ever paid the same attention to the quality of his rhythm as Milton. What other poets effect, as it were by chance, Milton achieved by the aid of science and of art; he studied the aptness of his numbers, and diligently tutored an ear which nature had gifted with the most delicate sensibility. In the flow of his rhythm, in the quality of his letter-sounds, in the disposition of his pauses, his verse almost ever fits the subject; and so insensibly does poetry blend with this,-the last beauty of exquisite versification,-that the reader may sometimes doubt whether it be the thought itself, or merely the happiness of its expression, which is the source of a gratification so deeply felt.-Guest.

English writers, however, he occupies a distinct and lofty position; Shakspeare is more passionate and picturesque; Daniel more graceful and idiomatic; Drayton more elaborate and ornate,-but Milton excels them all in the simple dignity of truth; had Eschylus written a sonnet, we might have imagined it to have flowed with equal solemnity and grandeur. Spenser, whose Fancy demanded a wider circle for her magical operations, has produced a few pleasing and fantastical sonnets, although deficient in vigour. But at the lip of Milton, the gentle reed of the shepherd was animated by a new and bolder spirit. His sonnets upon Cromwell, his own blindness, his deceased wife, and the martyrs of Piedmont, are noble and sublime. The invocation to the Nightingale wants the rural feeling of his earlier poems,-but the line in which he speaks of her

Liquid notes that close the eye of day is exquisitely beautiful and tender.

The prose works of Milton, from their controversial character, have not undergone any analysis in the present memoir; Coleridge considered his style not less characteristic of the philosophic republican, than Cowley's of the first-rate gentleman. It is built up into a lofty grandeur with classic idioms, and astonishes by the power and the copiousness of its invective. The nervous energy of his intellect is never more fully developed than in the daring attitudes of defiance. Hume's criticism of Demosthenes is not inapplicable to Milton;-vehement reasoning, disdainful anger, fearlessness, freedom, hurried along with a violent inflammation of language, and involved in a chain of elaborate argument, form his leading characteristics. Every word seems to be inspired by the heart of the writer; and those tremendous declamations,

which Cicero called the thunderbolts of Demosthenes, were never hurled with a more terrific impetuosity than the anathemas of Milton against the king and the episcopacy. When Socrates was asked in what strength consisted, he replied, "In the motion of the soul with the body." This is the secret of Milton's vigour; his soul went with his hand.

If contrasted with some of his immediate contemporaries, he will be found wanting in harmony, in purity, and in condensation; even in his own day his style was remarkable for its peculiarities; he professes his inability to conceive what it "ailed to be so soon distinguishable." The subjects that occupied his attention did not readily admit the milder Graces that adorn the contemplations of his antagonist Bishop Hall, or the florid and aureate pages of Jeremy Taylor, in whom the Loves are always seen the companions of Wisdom. A comparison of Milton's various eulogies of marriage, in the Treatise upon Divorce, with the eloquent enthusiasm of Taylor overflowing in the Sermon on the Wedding Ring, would place their merits in a very striking light. It is in the indignant, the scornful, the denouncing, that his genius seems to speak with the clearest voice; nothing can exceed the glare of his hatred; a single flash lights us through a page. His portraits of Zeal; of Truth; of Justice; "the strength, the kingdom, the power, and the majesty of all ages;" of Error, with her huge overshadowing train sweeping the stars out of the firmament of the church, in the dark era preceding the Reformation; of Antiquity, the "unactive and lifeless Colossus;" the comparison of the Gospel to a mirror of diamond, dazzling and piercing the misty eye-ball; the description of God's opening the drowsy eyelids by the glimmering light which Wickliffe

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and his followers dispersed,-all these passages are nobly conceived and vividly expressed. Not less beautiful is the observation at the conclusion of the Chronicle of Geoffrey of Monmouth,-" By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines where daylight and twilight meet us with a clear dawn, presenting to our view, though at a far distance, clear colours and shapes." Or the allusion to the legend of the martyr Polycarp,-" The fire, when it came to proof, would not do its work; but, starting off like a full sail from the mast, did but reflect a golden light upon his unviolated limbs, exhaling such a sweet odour, as if all the incense of Arabia had been burning." Southey has introduced this poetical description into his criental romance of Thalaba. And this is the writer whom Voltaire, with all the malignity of ignorance, pronounced a miserable writer of prose!

The reasons which have induced me to pass over thus rapidly the polemical disquisitions of Milton, render a review of his political character inexpedient. That criticism, however, is certainly unjust to his memory, which supposes him to have been actuated by any feeling but the loftiest patriotism; the patriotism, indeed, of a visionary, full of dangerous experiments and extravagant expectations, but, nevertheless, sincere and disinterested. He confessed to his friend Heimbach that he possessed no influence with the individuals in power. The crafty hypocrisy of Cromwell and his peers differed widely from that noble and heroic wisdom, to be obtained, he declared, by imbuing the mind with foreign writings, and the examples of the best ages. Carried by an ardent imagination into earlier times, and among the simpler and

severer manners of patriarchal society, he was always grasping at some ideal excellence—some beautiful shadow. In all the struggles of controversial animosity, in all the fierceness of his republican zeal, he was never forsaken, as he affirmed, by the hope of "clasping inseparable hands with joy and bliss," where they who, "by their labours, counsels, and prayers, have been earnest for the common good of their country," shall receive a glorious reward. It becomes us, therefore, while sighing over the intemperance of his anger, to remember that he lived in the midst of the battle*, when the passions of men were goaded into fury, when fanaticism darkened into madness, and the voice of reason was drowned in the tumult of an arming nation.