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with finite hands of infinite things, Milton was but a sublimated type of his age, and of the Commonwealth, when man, struggling for political freedom, went, as in the later age of the French Illuminati, too far in the regions of spirit and of faith. As Dante, with a powerful satire, filled his poem with the personages of the day, assigning his enemies to the girone of the Inferno, so Milton vents his gentler spleen by placing cowls and hood and habits in the limbo of vanity and paradise of fools:

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all these upwhirled aloft

Fly o'er the backside of the world far off,
Into a limbo large and broad, since called
The paradise of fools.

It was a setting forth of that spirit which, when the Cavaliers were many of them formalists, and the Puritans many of them fanatics, led to the rise of many sects, and caused rude soldiers to bellow their own riotous fancies from the pulpit. In the suddenness of change, when the earthly throne had been destroyed, men misconceived what was due to the heavenly; the fancy which had been before curbed by an awe for authority, and was too ignorant to move without it, now revelled unrebuked among the mysteries which are not revealed to angelic vision, and thus "fools rushed in where angels fear to tread."

The book could not fail to bring him immense fame, but personally he received very little for it in money. less than £20.

PARADISE REGAINED. It was Thomas Ellwood, Milton's Quaker friend, who, after reading the Paradise Lost, suggested the Paradise Regained. This poem will bear no comparison with its great companion. It may, without irreverence, be called "The gospel according to John Milton." Beauties it does contain; but the very foundation of it is false. Milton makes man regain Paradise by the success of Christ in withstanding the Devil's temptations in the wilderness; a

new presentation of his Arian theology, which is quite transcendental; whereas, in our opinion, the gate of Paradise was opened only "by His precious death and burial; His glorious resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost." But if it is immeasurably inferior in its conception. and treatment, it is quite equal to the Paradise Lost in its execution.

A few words as to Milton's vocabulary and style must close our notice of this greatest of English poets. With regard to the first, the Latin element, which is so manifest in his prose works, largely predominates in his poems, but accords better with the poetic license. In a list of authors which Mr. Marsh has prepared, down to Milton's time, which includes an analysis of the sixth book of the Paradise Lost, he is found to employ only eighty per cent. of Anglo-Saxon words-less than any up to that day. But his words are chosen with a delicacy of taste and ear which astonishes and delights; his works are full of an adaptive harmony, the suiting of sound to sense. His rhythm is perfect. We have not space for extended illustrations, but the reader will notice this in the lady's song in Comus the address to

Sweet Echo, sweeter nymph, that liv'st unseen
Within thy airy shell,

By slow Meander's margent green!

Sweet queen of parley, daughter of the sphere,

So may'st thou be translated to the skies,

And give resounding grace to all heaven's harmonies.

And again, the description of Chastity, in the same poem, is inimitable in the language:

So dear to Heaven is saintly Chastity,
That when a soul is found sincerely so,

A thousand liveried angels lackey her.

HIS SCHOLARSHIP. It is unnecessary to state the wellknown fact, attested by all his works, of his elegant and ver

satile scholarship. He was the most learned man in England in his day. If, like J. C. Scaliger, he did not commit Homer to memory in twenty-one days, and the whole of the Greek poets in three months, he had all classical learning literally at his fingers' ends, and his works are absolutely glistening with drops which show that every one has been dipped in that Castalian fountain which, it was fabled, changed the earthly flowers of the mind into immortal jewels.

Nor need we refer to what every one concedes, that a vein of pure but austere morals runs through all his works; but Puritan as he was, his myriad fancy led him into places which Puritanism abjured: the cloisters, with their dim religious light, in Il Penseroso - and anon with mirth he cries:

Come and trip it as you go,

On the light fantastic toe.

SONNETS. His sonnets have been variously estimated: they are not as polished as his other poems, but are crystallike and sententious, abrupt bursts of opinion and feeling in fourteen lines. Their masculine power it was which caused Wordsworth, himself a prince of sonneteers, to say:

In his hand,

The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains . . .

That to his dead wife, whom he saw in a vision; that to
Cyriac Skinner on his blindness, and that to the persecuted
Waldenses, are the most known and appreciated. That to

Skinner is a noble assertion of heart and hope:

Cyriac, this three-years-day these eyes, though clear
To outward view, of blemish and of spot,
Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot:
Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear
Of sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year,
Or man, or woman. Yet I argue not
Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer

Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience friend to have lost them over-plied

In liberty's defence, my noble task,

Of which all Europe talks from side to side,

This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask
Content, though blind, had I no better guide.

Milton died in 1674, of gout, which had long afflicted him; and he left his name and works to posterity. Posterity has done large but mistaken justice to his fame. Men have not discriminated between his real merits and his faults: all parties have conceded the former, and conspired to conceal the latter. A just statement of both will still establish his great fame on the immutable foundations of truth a fame, the honest pursuit of which caused him, throughout his long life,

To scorn delights, and live laborious days.

No writer has ever been the subject of more uncritical, ignorant, and senseless panegyric: like Bacon, he is lauded by men who never read his works, and are entirely ignorant of the true foundation of his fame. Nay, more; partisanship becomes very warlike, and we are reminded in this controversy of the Italian gentleman, who fought three duels in maintaining that Ariosto was a better poet than Tasso: in the third he was mortally wounded, and he confessed before dying that he had never read a line of either. A similar logomachy has marked the course of Milton's champions; words like sharp swords have been wielded by ignorance, and have injured the poet's true fame.

He now stands before the world, not only as the greatest English poet, except Shakspeare, but also as the most remarkable example and illustration of the theory we have adopted, that literature is a very vivid and permanent interpreter of contemporary history. To those who ask for a philosophic summary of the age of Charles I. and Cromwell, the answer may be justly given: "Study the works of John Milton, and you will find it."

CHAPTER XX.

COWLEY, BUTLER, AND WALTON.

Cowley and Milton.

Cowley's Life and Works.

His Fame.

I

Butler's Career.
Hudibras.

His Poverty and Death.

COWLEY AND MILTON.

Izaak Walton.

The Angler; and Lives.
Other Writers.

N contrast with Milton, in his own age, both in political tenets and in the character of his poetry, stood Cowley, the poetical champion of the party of king and cavaliers during the civil war. Historically he belongs to two periods. - antecedent and consequent that of the rebellion itself, and that of the Restoration: the latter was a reaction from the former, in which the masses changed their opinions, in which the Puritan leaders were silenced, and in which the constant and consistent Cavaliers had their day of triumph. Both parties, however, modified their views somewhat after the whirlwind of excitement had swept by, and both deprecated the extreme violence of their former actions. This is cleverly set forth in a charming paper of Lord Macaulay, entitled Cowley and Milton. It purports to be the report of a pleasant colloquy between the two in the spring of 1665, "set down by a gentleman of the Middle Temple." Their principles are courteously expressed, in a retrospective view of the great rebellion.

COWLEY'S LIFE AND WORKS.

Abraham Cowley, the post

humous son of a grocer, was born in London, in the year 1618. He is said to have been so precocious that he read

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