rejoiced us formerly. Our late gloomy and turbulent times are passed for ever.

Marvell. Perhaps they are, if anything is for ever; but the sparing Deluge may peradventure be commuted for unsparing Fire, as we are threatened. The arrogant, the privileged, the stiff upholders of established wrong, the deaf opponents of equitable reformation, the lazy consumers of ill-requited industry, the fraudulent who, unable to stop the course of the sun, pervert the direction of the gnomon1- all these, peradventure, may be gradually consumed by the process of silent contempt, or suddenly scattered by the tempest of popular indignation. As we see in masquerades the real judge and the real soldier stopped and mocked by the fictitious, so do we see in the carnival of to-day the real man of dignity hustled, shoved aside, and derided, by those who are invested with the semblance by the milliners of the court. The populace is taught to respect this livery alone, and is proud of being permitted to look through the grating at such ephemeral frippery. And yet false gems and false metals have never been valued above real ones. Until our people alter these notions; until they estimate the wise and virtuous above the silly and profligate, the man of genius above the man of title; until they hold the knave and cheat of St. James's as low as the knave and cheat of St. Giles's 2 they are fitter for the slave-market than for any

other station.

Parker. You would have no distinctions, I fear.

Marvell. On the contrary, I would have greater than exist at present. You cannot blot or burn out an ancient name; you cannot annihilate past services; you cannot subtract one single hour from eternity, nor wither one leaf on his brow who hath entered into it. Sweep away from before me the soft grubs of yesterday's formation, generated by the sickliness of the plant they feed upon; sweep them away unsparingly - then will you clearly see distinctions, and easily count the men who have attained them worthily.

Parker. In a want of respect to established power and principles originated most of the calamities we have latterly undergone.

1 The index to a sun-dial.

2 St. James was a region of the court; St. Giles of the very poor.

Marvell. Say rather, in the averseness of that power and the inadequacy of those principles to resist the encroachment of injustice; say rather, on their tendency to distort the poor creatures swaddled up in them; add, moreover, the reluctance of the old women who rock and dandle them to change their habiliments for fresh and wholesome ones. A man will break the windows of his own house, that he may not perish by foul air within; now, whether is he, or those who bolted the door on him, to blame for it? If he is called mad or inconsiderate, it is only by those who are ignorant of the cause and insensible of the urgency. I declare I am rejoiced at seeing a gentleman, whose ancestors have signally served their country, treated with deference and respect; because it evinces a sense of justice and of gratitude in the people, and because it may incite a few others, whose ambition would take another course, to desire the same. Different is my sentence, when he who has not performed the action claims more honour than he who performed it, and thinks himself the worthier if twenty are between them than if there be one or none. Still less accordant is it with my principles, and less reducible to my comprehension, that they who devised the ruin of cities and societies should be exhibited as deserving much higher distinction than they + who have corrected the hearts and enlarged the intellects, and have performed it not only without the hope of reward, but almost with the certainty of persecution.

Parker. Ever too hard upon great men, Mr. Marvell!

Marvell. Little men in lofty places, who throw long shadows because our sun is setting, the man so little and the places so lofty, that, casting my pebble, I only show where they stand. They would be less contented with themselves if they had obtained their preferment honestly. Luck and dexterity always give more pleasure than intellect and knowledge; because they fill up what they fall on to the brim at once, and people run to them with acclamations at the splash. Wisdom is reserved and noiseless, contented with hard earnings, and daily letting go some early acquisition, to make room for better specimens. But great is the exultation of a worthless man, when he receives, for the chips and raspings of his Bridewell logwood, a richer reward than the best and wisest

for extensive tracts of well-cleared truths; when he who has sold his country

Parker. Forbear, forbear, good Mr. Marvell!

Marvell. When such is higher in estimation than he who would have saved it; when his emptiness is heard above the voice that hath shaken Fanaticism in her central shrine, that hath bowed down tyrants to the scaffold, that hath raised up nations from the dust, that alone hath been found worthy to celebrate, as angels do, creating and redeeming Love, and to precede with its solitary sound the trumpet that will call is to our doom.

Parker. I am unwilling to feign ignorance of the gentleman you designate; but really now you would make a very Homer of him.

Marvell. It appears to me that Homer is to Milton what a harp is to an organ, though a harp under the hand of Apollo. Parker. I have always done him justice; I have always called him a learned man.

Marvell. Call him henceforward the most glorious one that ever existed upon earth. If two- Bacon and Shakespeare -have equalled him in diversity and intensity of power, did either of these spring away with such resolution from the sublimest heights of genius, to liberate and illuminate with patient labour the manacled human race? And what is his recompense? The same recompense as all men like him have received, and will receive for ages. . . .

I am confident that Milton is heedless of how little weight he is held by those who are of none; and that he never looks toward those somewhat more eminent, between whom and himself there have crept the waters of oblivion. As the pearl ripens in the obscurity of its shell, so ripens in the tomb all the fame that is truly precious. In fame he will be happier than in friendship. Were it possible that one among the faithful of the angels could have suffered wounds and dissolution in his conflict with the false, I should scarcely feel greater awe at discovering on some bleak mountain the bones of this our mighty defender, once shining in celestial panoply, once glowing at the trumpet-blast of God, but not proof against the

desperate and the damned, than I have felt at entering the humble abode of Milton, whose spirit already reaches heaven, yet whose corporeal frame hath no quiet or safe resting-place here below. And shall not I, who loved him early, have the lonely and sad privilege to love him still? Or shall fidelity to power be a virtue, and fidelity to tribulation an offence?

Parker. We may best show our fidelity by our discretion. It becomes my station, and suits my principles, to defend the English Constitution, both in Church and State....

Marvell. Give me the poetical mind, the mind poetical in all things; give me the poetical heart, the heart of hope and confidence, that beats the more strongly and resolutely under the good thrown down, and raises up fabric after fabric on the same foundation.

Parker. At your time of life, Mr. Marvell?

Marvell. At mine, my lord bishop! I have lived with Milton. Such creative and redeeming spirits are like kindly and renovating Nature. Volcano comes after volcano; yet covereth she with herbage and foliage, with vine and olive, and with whatever else refreshes and gladdens her, the Earth that has been gasping under the exhaustion of her throes.

Parker. He has given us such a description of Eve's beauty as appears to me somewhat too pictorial, too luxuriant, too suggestive, too I know not what.

Marvell. The sight of beauty, in her purity and beatitude, turns us from all unrighteousness, and is death to sin.

Parker. Before we part, my good Mr. Marvell, let me assure you that we part in amity, and that I bear no resentment in my breast against your friend. I am patient of Mr. Milton; I am more than patient, I am indulgent, seeing that his influence on society is past.

-

Marvell. Past it is, indeed. What a deplorable thing is it that folly should so constantly have power over wisdom, and wisdom so intermittently over folly! But we live morally, as we used to live politically, under a representative system; and the majority (to employ a phrase of people at elections) carries the day.

Parker. Let us piously hope, Mr. Marvell, that God in his good time may turn Mr. Milton from the error of his ways, and

incline his heart to repentance, and that so he may finally be prepared for death.

Marvell. The wicked can never be prepared for it; the good always are. What is the preparation which so many ruffled wrists point out? - to gabble over prayer and praise and confession and contrition. My lord, heaven is not to be won by short hard work at the last, as some of us take a degree at the university, after much irregularity and negligence. I prefer a steady pace from the outset to the end; coming in cool, and dismounting quietly. Instead of which, I have known many old playfellows of the devil spring up suddenly from their beds, and strike at him treacherously; while he, without a cuff, laughed and made grimaces in the corner of the room.

...

last.

SOUTHEY AND LANDOR 1

Southey. We open the Twelfth Book: we see land at

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. . . .

Southey. You will not countenance the critic, nor Dryden whom he quotes, in saying that Milton "saw Nature through the spectacles of books."

1 The two friends are represented, during a visit of Southey's to Landor's home at Clifton (about 1837), as discussing together the poems of Milton, page by page. They are now at the last book of Paradise Lost.