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 exults. Against the sword of Michael, against the thunder of Jehovah, against the flaming lake, and the marl 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 any thing 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, coloured by their personal feelings.

The character of Milton was peculiarly distinguished by loftiness of spirit; that of Dante by intensity of feeling. In every line of the Divine Comedy we discern the asperity 1 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 nor 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 discolours 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

1 Milton was by no means free from this fault.

Horace, Art of Poetry, L 375, refers to the bitter flavour of Sardinian honey. Job x, 22.

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 woful 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 statesman 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. Venal and licentious scribblers, with just sufficient talent to clothe the thoughts of a pandar in the style of a bellman, were now the favourite 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, dropping with wine, bloated with gluttony, and reeling in obscene dances. Amidst these that fair Muse was placed, like the chaste lady of the Masque, lofty, spotless, and serene, to be chattered at, and pointed at, and grinned at, by the whole rout of Satyrs 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 proscription, nor neglect, had power to disturb his sedate and majestic patience. His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they were singularly equable. His temper was serious, perhaps stern; but it was a temper which no sufferings could render sullen or fretful. 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 when, after having experienced every calamity which is incident to our nature, old, 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 Theocritus nor Ariosto had a finer or a more healthful 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 haram, 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 dells, beautiful as fairy land, are embosomed in its most rugged and gigantic elevations. The roses and myrtles bloom unchilled on the verge of the avalanche.

Traces, indeed, of the peculiar character of Milton may be found in all his works; but it is most strongly displayed in the Sonnets. Those remarkable poems have been undervalued by critics who have not understood their nature. They have no epigrammatic point. There is none of the ingenuity of Filicaja1 in the thought, none of the hard and brilliant enamel of Petrarch in the style. They are simple but majestic records of the feelings of the poet; as little tricked out for the public eye as his diary would have been. A victory, an unexpected attack upon the city, a momentary fit of depression or exultation, a jest thrown out against one of his books, a dream which for a short time restored to him that beautiful face over which the grave had closed for ever,2 led him to musings, which, without effort, shaped themselves into verse. The unity of sentiment and severity of style which characterise these little pieces remind us of the Greek Anthology, or perhaps still more of the Collects of the English Liturgy. The noble poem on the massacres of Piedmont is strictly a collect in verse.3

1 Vincenzo da Filicaja, 1642-1707, whom Macaulay admired far more than would appear from this allusion, and whom he has elsewhere termed the greatest lyric poet of modern times. See essay on Addison, vol. iii., p. 346.

Not Milton's first wife, Mary Powell, but his second, Catherine Woodcock, whom he married in 1656 and who died in 1658.

Compare Pattison's observations upon Milton's sonnets: "Their very force and beauty consist in their being the momentary and spontaneous explosion of an emotion welling up from the depths of the soul and forcing itself into metrical expression, as it were, in spite of the writer. . . . In their naked, unadorned simplicity of language they may easily seem to a reader fresh from Petrarch to be homely and prosaic. Place them in relation to the circumstances on which each piece turns and we begin to feel the superiority for poetic effect of real emotion over emotion meditated and revived. . . . It is this actuality which distinguishes the sonnets of Milton from any other sonnets. Of this difference Wordsworth was conscious when he struck out the phrase In his hand the thing became a trump '" ("Life of Milton" (English Men of Letters), pp. 169-170).

The Sonnets are more or less striking, according as the occasions which gave birth to them are more or less interesting. But they are, almost without exception, dignified by a sobriety and greatness of mind to which we know not where to look for a parallel. It would, indeed, be scarcely safe to draw any decided inferences as to the character of a writer from passages directly egotistical. But the qualities which we have ascribed to Milton, though perhaps most strongly marked in those parts of his works which treat of his personal feelings, are distinguishable in every page, and impart to all his writings, prose and poetry, English, Latin, and Italian, a strong family likeness.

His public conduct was such as was to be expected from a man of a spirit so high and of an intellect so powerful. He lived at one of the most memorable eras in the history of mankind, at the very crisis of the great conflict between Oromasdes and Arimanes,1 liberty and despotism, reason and prejudice. That great battle was fought for no single generation, for no single land. The destinies of the human race were staked on the same cast with the freedom of the English people. Then were first proclaimed those mighty principles which have since worked their way into the depths of the American forests, which have roused Greece from the slavery and degradation of two thousand years, and which, from one end of Europe to the other, have kindled an unquenchable fire in the hearts of the oppressed, and loosed the knees of the oppressors with an unwonted fear.

Of those principles, then struggling for their infant existence, Milton was the most devoted and eloquent literary champion. We need not say how much we admire his public conduct. But we cannot disguise from ourselves that a large portion of his countrymen still think it unjustifiable. The civil war, indeed, has been more discussed, and is less understood, than any event in English history. The friends of liberty laboured under the disadvantage of which the lion in the fable complained so bitterly. Though they were the conquerors, their enemies were the painters. As a body, the Roundheads had done their utmost to decry and

1 Oromasdes (Ahura Mazda) and Ahrimanes (Angra Mainya) were in the ancient religion of Persia the powers of good and of evil respectively. Each with his host of angels they waged unceasing war for the possession of the universe. To fight upon the side of Oromasdes the beneficent power was man's duty and his happiness.

2 This is an example of misleading rhetoric. It is quite possible to recognise the immense service which the Puritans rendered to liberty and truth by their obstinate refusal to be coerced and yet to see that they were for the most part as dogmatic and intolerant as their enemies. The conflict was less between reason and prejudice than between hostile prejudices which in the long run failed to put each other down.

ruin literature; and literature was even with them, as, in the long run, it always is with its enemies. The best book on their side of the question is the charming narrative of Mrs. Hutchinson.1 May's 2 History of the Parliament is good; but it breaks off at the most interesting crisis of the struggle. The performance of Ludlow is foolish and violent; and most of the later writers who have espoused the same cause, Oldmixon for instance, and Catherine Macaulay,5 have, to say the least, been more distinguished by zeal than either by candour or by skill. On the other side are the most authoritative and the most popular historical works in our language, that of Clarendon, and that of

1 Lucy, daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, born in 1620 (date of death unknown). She married in 1638 John Hutchinson, who became a colonel in the army of the Parliament and sat in the High Court of Justice which tried Charles I. Her Memoirs of him give a deep insight into Puritan thought and feeling, but do not constitute a history of the period. They have been excellently edited by Mr. C. H. Firth.

Thomas May, 1595-1650, a facile man of letters who wrote plays, poems, translations and original prose, was employed by the House of Commons in 1646 to draw up a declaration for vindicating to the world the honour of the Parliament. In 1647 he published the History of the Long Parliament, which may in a sense be regarded as an official version of its proceedings, yet has obtained the praise of such men as Chatham.

* Edmund Ludlow, 1617-1692, a member of the Long Parliament, rose to be lieutenant-general in the Parliamentary army. He sat in the High Court of Justice and held high command in the conquest of Ireland. An inflexible republican he could not be brought to approve the rule of Cromwell. Forced to fly at the Restoration he spent many years in exile and died at Vevey on the Lake of Geneva. His Memoirs, which afford much knowledge respecting the Civil War and Commonwealth, have also been edited by Mr. C. H. Firth.

John Oldmixon, 1673-1742, wrote amongst other historical works a Critical History of England and a History of England during the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart in which he attacked Clarendon and gave a Whig version of the events of the Stuart period. He is remembered chiefly by Pope's ridicule in the Dunciad.

Catherine Sawbridge, 1731-1791, who married in 1760 Dr. Macaulay, wrote a History of England from the accession of James I. to that of the Brunswick line, which at one time had a considerable reputation. She was a decided Whig or rather republican. It was of Mrs. Macaulay that Johnson observed: "She is better employed at her toilet, than using her pen. It is better she should be reddening her own cheeks than blackening other people's characters."

Edward Hyde, first earl of Clarendon, 1609-1674, sat in the Long Parliament and was at first an active member of the reforming majority. When it was broken up by differences of opinion as to the reformation of the Church, Hyde, along with his friend Falkland, became a leader of the party opposed to change. He served Charles I. in the Civil War and shared the wanderings of Charles II. After the Restoration he became Chancellor and Earl of Clarendon, and was for a while chief minister, but, losing the confidence of Charles and becoming unpopular in the country, he was impeached and went into exile in 1667. During the remainder of his life he was chiefly employed in writing his History of the Great Rebellion, which continues to be one of the principal authorities for that period, although impaired by prejudice and inaccuracy.

VOL. I.-3