Nobody could understand this who had not read the strange notions of physicians, which continued down to the age of Milton, in which we find such nonsense as "adust humours." I think you would be unreluctant to expunge vv. 624, 625, 626, 627. Landor. Quite and there is also much verbiage about the giants, and very perplexed from v. 88 to 97. But some of the heaviest verses in the poem are those on Noah, from 717 to 737. In the following we have "vapour and exhalation," which signify the same. Sea covered sea, Sea without shore. V. 750. This is very sublime: and indeed I could never heartily join with those who condemn in Ovid Omnia pontus erant; deerant quoque litora ponto. It is true, the whole fact is stated in the first hemistych; but the mind's eye moves from the centre to the circumference, and the pleonasm carries it into infinity. If there is any fault in this passage of Ovid, Milton has avoided it, but he frequently falls into one vastly more than Ovidian, and after so awful a pause as is nowhere else in all the regions of poetry. How didst thou grieve then, Adam, to behold Depopulation! Thee another flood, Of tears and sorrow a flood, thee also drowned, It is wonderful how little reflection on many occasions, and how little knowledge on some very obvious ones, is displayed by Bentley. To pass over his impudence in pretending to correct the words of Milton (whose handwriting was extant) just as he would the corroded or corrupt text of any ancient author, here in v. 895. "To drown the world with man therein, or beast;" he tells us that birds are forgot, and would substitute "With man or beast or fowl." He might as well have said that fleas are forgot. Beast means everything that is not man. It would be much more sensible to object to such an expression as men and animals, and to ask, are not men animals? and even more so than the rest, if anima has with men a more extensive meaning than with other creatures. Bentley in many things was very acute; but his criticisms on poetry produce the same effect as the water of a lead mine on plants. He knew no more about it than Hallam knows, in whom acuteness is certainly not blunted by such a weight of learning. Southey. We open the Twelfth Book: we see land at last. Landor. Yes, and dry land too. Happily the twelfth is the shortest. In a continuation of six hundred and twenty-five flat verses, we are prepared for our passage over several such deserts of almost equal extent, and still more frequent, in Paradise Regained. But at the close of the poem now under our examination, there is a brief union of the sublime and the pathetic for about twenty lines, beginning with "All in bright array." We are comforted by the thought that Providence had not abandoned our first parents, but was still their guide; that, although they had lost Paradise, they were not debarred from Eden; that, although the angel had left them solitary and sorrowing, he left them "yet in peace." The termination is proper and complete. In Johnson's estimate I do not perceive the unfairness of which many have complained. Among his first observations is this: Scarcely any recital is wished shorter for the sake of quickening the main action." This is untrue were it true, why remark, as he does subsequently, that the poem is mostly read as a duty; not as a pleasure. I think it unnecessary to say a word on the moral or the subject; for it requires no genius to select a grand one. The heaviest poems may be appended to the loftiest themes. Andreini and others, whom Milton turned over and tossed aside, are evidences. It requires a large stock of patience to travel through Vida; and we slacken in our march, although accompanied with the livelier singsong of Sannazar. Let any reader, who is not by many degrees more pious than poetical, be asked whether he felt a very great interest in the greatest actors of Paradise Lost, in what is either said or done by the angels or the Creator; and whether the humblest and weakest does not most attract him. Johnson's remarks on the allegory of Milton are just and wise; so are those on the non-materiality or non-immateriality of Satan. These faults might have been easily avoided but Milton, with all his strength, chose rather to make Antiquity his shield-bearer, and to come forward under a protection which he might proudly have disdained. Southey. You will not countenance the critic, nor Dryden whom he quotes, in saying that Milton "saw Nature through the spectacles of books." Landor. Unhappily both he and Dryden saw Nature from between the houses of Fleet-street. If ever there was a poet who knew her well, and described her in all her loveliness, it was Milton. In the Paradise Lost how profuse in his descriptions, as became the time and place! in the Allegro and Penseroso, how exquisite and select! Johnson asks, "What Englishman can take delight in transcribing passages, which, if they lessen the reputation of Milton, diminish, in some degree, the honour of our country! I hope the honour of our country will always rest on truth and justice. It is not by concealing what is wrong that anything right can be accomplished. There is no pleasure in transcribing such passages, but there is great utility. Inferior writers exercise no interest, attract no notice, and serve no purpose. Johnson has himself done great good by exposing great faults in great authors. His criticism on Milton's highest work is the most valuable of all his writings. He seldom is erroneous in his censures, but he never is sufficiently excited to admiration of what is purest and highest in poetry. He has this in common with common minds (from which however his own is otherwise far remote), to be pleased with what is nearly on a level with him, and to drink as contentedly a heady beverage with its discoloured froth, as what is of the best vintage. He is morbid, not only in his weakness, but in his strength. There is much to pardon, much to pity, much to respect, and no little to admire in him. After I have been reading the Paradise Lost, I can take up no other poet with satisfaction. I seem to have left the music of Handel for the music of the streets, or at best for drums and fifes. Although in Shakespeare there are occasional bursts of harmony no less sublime, yet, if there were many such in continuation, it would be hurtful, not only in comedy, but also in tragedy. The greaterpart should be equable and conversational. For, if the excitement were the same at the beginning, the middle, and the end; if consequently (as must be the case) the language and versification were equally elevated throughout; any long poem would be a bad one, and, worst of all, a drama. In our English heroic verse, such as Milton has composed it, there is a much greater variety of feet, of movement, of musical notes and bars, than in the Greek heroic; and the final sounds are incomparably more diversified. My predilection in youth was on the side of Homer; for I had read the Iliad twice, and the Odyssea once, before the Paradise Lost. Averse as I am to everything relating to theology, and especially to the view of it thrown open by this poem, I recur to it incessantly as the noblest specimen in the world of eloquence, harmony, and genius. Southey. Learned and sensible men are of opinion that the Paradise Lost should have ended with the words "Providence their guide." It might very well have ended there; but we are unwilling to lose sight all at once of our first parents. Only one more glimpse is allowed us we are thankful for it. We have seen the natural tears they dropped; we have seen that they wiped them soon. And why was it? Not because the world was all before them, but because there still remained for them, under the guidance of Providence, not indeed the delights of Paradise, now lost for ever, but the genial clime and calm repose of Eden. Landor. It has been the practice in late years to supplant one dynasty by another, political and poetical. Within our own memory no man had ever existed who preferred Lucretius, on the whole, to Virgil, or Dante to Homer. But the great Florentine, in these days, is extolled high above the Grecian and Milton. Few, I believe, have studied him more attentively or with more delight than I have; but beside the prodigious disproportion of the bad to the good, there are fundamental defects which there are not in either of the other two. In the Divina Commedia the characters are without any bond of union, any field of action, any definite aim. There is no central light above the Bolge; and we are chilled in Paradise even at the side of Beatrice. Southey. Some poetical Perillus must surely have invented the terza rima. I feel in reading it as a school-boy feels when he is beaten over the head with a bolster. Landor. We shall hardly be in time for dinner. What should we have been if we had repeated with just eulogies all the noble things in the poem we have been reading? Southey. They would never have weaned you from the Mighty Mother who placed her turreted crown on the head of Shakespeare. Landor. A rib of Shakespeare would have made a Milton: the same portion of Milton, all poets born ever since. SECOND CONVERSATION. Southey. As we are walking on, and before we open our Milton again, we may digress a little in the direction of those poets who have risen up from under him, and of several who seem to have never had him in sight. Landor. We will, if you please: and I hope you may not find me impatient to attain the object of our walk. However, let me confess to you, at starting, that I disapprove of models, even of the most excellent. Faults may be avoided, especially if they are pointed out to the inexperienced in such bright examples as Milton: and teachers in schools and colleges would do well to bring them forward, instead of inculcating an indiscriminate admiration. But every man's mind, if there is enough of it, has its peculiar bent. Milton may be imitated, and has been, where he is stiff, where he is inverted, where he is pedantic; and probably those men we take for mockers were unconscious of their mockery. But who can teach, or who is to be taught, his richness, or his tenderness, or his strength? The closer an inferior poet comes to a great model, the more disposed am I to sweep him out of my way. Southey. Yet you repeat with enthusiasm the Latin poetry of Robert Smith, an imitator of Lucretius. Landor. I do; for Lucretius himself has nowhere written such a continuity of admirable poetry. He is the only modern Latin poet who has composed three sentences together worth reading; and indeed, since Ovid, no ancient has done it. I ought to bear great illwill toward him; for he drove me from the path of poetry I had chosen, and I crept into a lower. What a wonderful thing it is, that the most exuberant and brilliant wit, and the purest poetry in the course of eighteen centuries, should have flowed from two brothers! Southey. We must see through many ages before we see through our own distinctly. Few among the best judges, and even among those who desired to judge dispassionately and impartially, have beheld their contemporaries in those proportions in which they appeared a century later. The ancients have greatly the advantage over us. Scarcely can any man believe that one whom he has seen in coat and cravat, can possibly be so great as one who wore a chlamys and a toga. Those alone look gigantic whom Time "multo |