I can fly or I can run,”

to skim the earth, to soar above the clouds, to bathe in the Elysian dew

of the rainbow, and to inhale the balmy smells of nard and cassia, which

the musky winds of the zephyr scatter through the cedared alleys of the

Hesperides.

There are several of the minor poems of Milton on which we would

willingly make a few remarks. Still more willingly would we enter into

a detailed examination of that admirable poem, the Paradise Regained,

which, strangely enough, is scarcely ever mentioned except as an

instance of the blindness of the parental affection which men of letters

bear towards the offspring of their intellects. That Milton was mistaken

in preferring this work, excellent as it is, to the Paradise Lost, we

readily admit. But we are sure that the superiority of the Paradise Lost

to the Paradise Regained is not more decided, than the superiority of

the Paradise Regained to every poem which has since made its appearance.

Our limits, however, prevent us from discussing the point at length. We

hasten on to that extraordinary production which the general suffrage of

critics has placed in the highest class of human compositions.

The only poem of modern times which can be compared with the Paradise

Lost is the Divine Comedy. The subject of Milton, in some points,

resembled that of Dante; but he has treated it in a widely different

manner. We cannot, we think, better illustrate our opinion respecting

our own great poet, than by contrasting him with the father of Tuscan

literature.

The poetry of Milton differs from that of Dante, as the hieroglyphics

of Egypt differed from the picture-writing of Mexico. The images which

Dante employs speak for themselves; they stand simply for what they are.

Those of Milton have a signification which is often discernible only to

the initiated. Their value depends less on what they directly represent

than on what they remotely suggest. However strange, however grotesque,

may be the appearance which Dante undertakes to describe, he never

shrinks from describing it. He gives us the shape, the colour, the

sound, the smell, the taste; he counts the numbers; he measures the

size. His similes are the illustrations of a traveller. Unlike those of

other poets, and especially of Milton, they are introduced in a plain,

business-like manner; not for the sake of any beauty in the objects from

which they are drawn; not for the sake of any ornament which they may

impart to the poem; but simply in order to make the meaning of the

writer as clear to the reader as it is to himself. The ruins of the

precipice which led from the sixth to the seventh circle of hell were

like those of the rock which fell into the Adige on the south of Trent.

The cataract of Phlegethon was like that of Aqua Cheta at the monastery

of St. Benedict. The place where the heretics were confined in burning

tombs resembled the vast cemetery of Arles.

Now let us compare with the exact details of Dante the dim intimations

of Milton. We will cite a few examples. The English poet has never

thought of taking the measure of Satan. He gives us merely a vague

idea of vast bulk. In one passage the fiend lies stretched out huge in

length, floating many a rood, equal in size to the earth-born enemies

of Jove, or to the sea-monster which the mariner mistakes for an island.

When he addresses himself to battle against the guardian angels, he

stands like Teneriffe or Atlas: his stature reaches the sky. Contrast

with these descriptions the lines in which Dante has described the

gigantic spectre of Nimrod. “His face seemed to me as long and as

broad as the ball of St. Peter’s at Rome, and his other limbs were

in proportion; so that the bank, which concealed him from the waist

downwards, nevertheless showed so much of him, that three tall Germans

would in vain have attempted to reach to his hair.” We are sensible that

we do no justice to the admirable style of the Florentine poet. But Mr.

Cary’s translation is not at hand; and our version, however rude, is

sufficient to illustrate our meaning.

Once more, compare the lazar-house in the eleventh book of the Paradise

Lost with the last ward of Malebolge in Dante. Milton avoids the

loathsome details, and takes refuge in indistinct but solemn and

tremendous imagery. Despair hurrying from couch to couch to mock the

wretches with his attendance, Death shaking his dart over them, but, in

spite of supplications, delaying to strike. What says Dante? “There was

such a moan there as there would be if all the sick who, between July

and September, are in the hospitals of Valdichiana, and of the Tuscan

swamps, and of Sardinia, were in one pit together; and such a stench was

issuing forth as is wont to issue from decayed limbs.”

We will not take upon ourselves the invidious office of settling

precedency between two such writers, Each in his own department is

incomparable; and each, we may remark, has wisely, or fortunately,

taken a subject adapted to exhibit his peculiar talent to the greatest

advantage. The Divine Comedy is a personal narrative. Dante is the

eye-witness and ear-witness of that which he relates. He is the very

man who has heard the tormented spirits crying out for the second death,

who has read the dusky characters on the portal within which there is

no hope, who has hidden his face from the terrors of the Gorgon, who

has fled from the hooks and the seething pitch of Barbariccia and

Draghignazzo. His own hands have grasped the shaggy sides of Lucifer.

His own feet have climbed the mountain of expiation. His own brow has

been marked by the purifying angel. The reader would throw aside such a

tale in incredulous disgust, unless it were told with the strongest

air of veracity, with a sobriety even in its horrors, with the greatest

precision and multiplicity in its details. The narrative of Milton in

this respect differs from that of Dante, as the adventures of Amadis

differ from those of Gulliver. The author of Amadis would have made his

book ridiculous if he had introduced those minute particulars which

give such a charm to the work of Swift, the nautical observations, the

affected delicacy about names, the official documents transcribed at

full length, and all the unmeaning gossip and scandal of the court,

springing out of nothing, and tending to nothing. We are not shocked

at being told that a man who lived, nobody knows when, saw many very

strange sights, and we can easily abandon ourselves to the illusion of

the romance. But when Lemuel Gulliver, surgeon, resident at Rotherhithe,

tells us of pygmies and giants, flying islands, and philosophising

horses, nothing but such circumstantial touches could produce for a

single moment a deception on the imagination.

Of all the poets who have introduced into their works the agency of

supernatural beings, Milton has succeeded best. Here Dante decidedly

yields to him: and as this is a point on which many rash and

ill-considered judgments have been pronounced, we feel inclined to dwell

on it a little longer. The most fatal error which a poet can possibly

commit in the management of his machinery, is that of attempting to

philosophise too much. Milton has been often censured for ascribing to

spirits many functions of which spirits must be incapable. But these

objections, though sanctioned by eminent names, originate, we venture to

say, in profound ignorance of the art of poetry.

What is spirit? What are our own minds, the portion of spirit with which

we are best acquainted? We observe certain phaenomena. We cannot

explain them into material causes. We therefore infer that there exists

something which is not material. But of this something we have no idea.

We can define it only by negatives. We can reason about it only by

symbols. We use the word; but we have no image of the thing; and the

business of poetry is with images, and not with words. The poet uses

words indeed; but they are merely the instruments of his art, not its

objects. They are the materials which he is to dispose in such a manner

as to present a picture to the mental eye. And if they are not so

disposed, they are no more entitled to be called poetry than a bale of

canvas and a box of colours to be called a painting.

Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men

must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and

nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle. The first

inhabitants of Greece, there is reason to believe, worshipped one

invisible Deity. But the necessity of having something more definite to

adore produced, in a few centuries, the innumerable crowd of Gods and

Goddesses. In like manner the ancient Persians thought it impious to

exhibit the Creator under a human form. Yet even these transferred to

the Sun the worship which, in speculation, they considered due only to

the Supreme Mind. The history of the Jews is the record of a continued

struggle between pure Theism, supported by the most terrible sanctions,

and the strangely fascinating desire of having some visible and tangible

object of adoration. Perhaps none of the secondary causes which Gibbon

has assigned for the rapidity with which Christianity spread over the

world, while Judaism scarcely ever acquired a proselyte, operated more

powerfully than this feeling. God, the uncreated, the incomprehensible,

the invisible, attracted few worshippers. A philosopher might admire

so noble a conception; but the crowd turned away in disgust from words

which presented no image to their minds. It was before Deity embodied in

a human form, walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning

on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the manger,

bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of the Synagogue, and the

doubts of the Academy, and the pride of the Portico, and the fasces of

the Lictor, and the swords of thirty legions, were humbled in the dust.

Soon after Christianity had achieved its triumph, the principle which

had assisted it began to corrupt it. It became a new Paganism. Patron

saints assumed the offices of household gods. St. George took the

place of Mars. St. Elmo consoled the mariner for the loss of Castor and

Pollux. The Virgin Mother and Cecilia succeeded to Venus and the Muses.

The fascination of sex and loveliness was again joined to that of

celestial dignity; and the homage of chivalry was blended with that of

religion. Reformers have often made a stand against these feelings;

but never with more than apparent and partial success. The men who

demolished the images in cathedrals have not always been able to

demolish those which were enshrined in their minds. It would not be

difficult to show that in politics the same rule holds good. Doctrines,

we are afraid, must generally be embodied before they can excite a

strong public feeling. The multitude is more easily interested for the

most unmeaning badge, or the most insignificant name, than for the most

important principle.

From these considerations, we infer that no poet, who should affect

that metaphysical accuracy for the want of which Milton has been blamed,

would escape a disgraceful failure. Still, however, there was another

extreme which, though far less dangerous, was also to be avoided. The

imaginations of men are in a great measure under the control of their

opinions. The most exquisite art of poetical colouring can produce

no illusion, when it is employed to represent that which is at once

perceived to be incongruous and absurd. Milton wrote in an age of

philosophers and theologians. It was necessary, therefore, for him to

abstain from giving such a shock to their understanding as might break

the charm which it was his object to throw over their imaginations. This

is the real explanation of the indistinctness and inconsistency with

which he has often been reproached. Dr. Johnson acknowledges that it

was absolutely necessary that the spirit should be clothed with material

forms. “But,” says he, “the poet should have secured the consistency

of his system by keeping immateriality out of sight, and seducing the

reader to drop it from his thoughts.” This is easily said; but what if

Milton could not seduce his readers to drop immateriality from their

thoughts? What if the contrary opinion had taken so full a possession

of the minds of men as to leave no room even for the half belief

which poetry requires? Such we suspect to have been the case. It

was impossible for the poet to adopt altogether the material or the

immaterial system. He therefore took his stand on the debatable ground.

He left the whole in ambiguity. He has doubtless, by so doing, laid

himself open to the charge of inconsistency. But, though philosophically

in the wrong, we cannot but believe that he was poetically in the right.

This task, which almost any other writer would have found impracticable,

was easy to him. The peculiar art which he possessed of communicating

his meaning circuitously through a long succession of associated ideas,

and of intimating more than he expressed, enabled him to disguise those

incongruities which he could not avoid.

Poetry which relates to the beings of another world ought to be at

once mysterious and picturesque. That of Milton is so. That of Dante

is picturesque indeed beyond any that ever was written. Its effect

approaches to that produced by the pencil or the chisel. But it is

picturesque to the exclusion of all mystery. This is a fault on the

right side, a fault inseparable from the plan of Dante’s poem, which,

as we have already observed, rendered the utmost accuracy of description

necessary. Still it is a fault. The supernatural agents excite an

interest; but it is not the interest which is proper to supernatural

agents. We feel that we could talk to the ghosts and daemons, without

any emotion of unearthly awe. We could, like Don Juan, ask them to

supper, and eat heartily in their company. Dante’s angels are good men

with wings. His devils are spiteful ugly executioners. His dead men are

merely living men in strange situations. The scene which passes between

the poet and Farinata is justly celebrated. Still, Farinata in the

burning tomb is exactly what Farinata would have been at an auto da

fe. Nothing can be more touching than the first interview of Dante and

Beatrice. Yet what is it, but a lovely woman chiding, with sweet austere

composure, the lover for whose affection she is grateful, but whose

vices she reprobates? The feelings which give the passage its charm

would suit the streets of Florence as well as the summit of the Mount of

Purgatory.

The spirits of Milton are unlike those of almost all other writers.

His fiends, in particular, are wonderful creations. They are not

metaphysical abstractions. They are not wicked men. They are not ugly

beasts. They have no horns, no tails, none of the fee-faw-fum of Tasso

and Klopstock. They have just enough in common with human nature to be

intelligible to human beings. Their characters are, like their forms,

marked by a certain dim resemblance to those of men, but exaggerated to

gigantic dimensions, and veiled in mysterious gloom.

Perhaps the gods and daemons of Aeschylus may best bear a comparison

with the angels and devils of Milton. The style of the Athenian had,

as we have remarked, something of the Oriental character; and the

same peculiarity may be traced in his mythology. It has nothing of the

amenity and elegance which we generally find in the superstitions of

Greece. All is rugged, barbaric, and colossal. The legends of Aeschylus

seem to harmonise less with the fragrant groves and graceful porticoes

in which his countrymen paid their vows to the God of Light and Goddess

of Desire, than with those huge and grotesque labyrinths of eternal

granite in which Egypt enshrined her mystic Osiris, or in which

Hindustan still bows down to her seven-headed idols. His favourite

gods are those of the elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth,

compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and an upstart, the

gigantic Titans, and the inexorable Furies. Foremost among his creations

of this class stands Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, the friend

of man, the sullen and implacable enemy of Heaven. Prometheus bears

undoubtedly a considerable resemblance to the Satan of Milton. In both

we find the same impatience of control, the same ferocity, the same

unconquerable pride. In both characters also are mingled, though in

very different proportions, some kind and generous feelings. Prometheus,

however, is hardly superhuman enough. He talks too much of his chains

and his uneasy posture: he is rather too much depressed and agitated.

His resolution 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 anything 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 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 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

woeful 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 in 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 fairyland, 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 Filicaja 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, 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.

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, 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 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. May’s 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, 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 Hume. The former is not

only ably written and full of valuable information, but has also an air

of dignity and sincerity which makes even the prejudices and errors with

which it abounds respectable. Hume, from whose fascinating narrative

the great mass of the reading public are still contented to take their

opinions, hated religion so much that he hated liberty for having been

allied with religion, and has pleaded the cause of tyranny with the

dexterity of an advocate, while affecting the impartiality of a judge.

The public conduct of Milton must be approved or condemned according

as the resistance of the people to Charles the First shall appear to

be justifiable or criminal. We shall therefore make no apology for

dedicating a few pages to the discussion of that interesting and most

important question. We shall not argue it on general grounds. We shall

not recur to those primary principles from which the claim of any

government to the obedience of its subjects is to be deduced. We are

entitled to that vantage ground; but we will relinquish it. We are, on

this point, so confident of superiority, that we are not unwilling to

imitate the ostentatious generosity of those ancient knights, who vowed

to joust without helmet or shield against all enemies, and to give

their antagonists the advantage of sun and wind. We will take the naked

constitutional question. We confidently affirm, that every reason which

can be urged in favour of the Revolution of 1688 may be urged with at

least equal force in favour of what is called the Great Rebellion.

In one respect, only, we think, can the warmest admirers of Charles

venture to say that he was a better sovereign than his son. He was not,

in name and profession, a Papist; we say in name and profession, because

both Charles himself and his creature Laud, while they abjured the

innocent badges of Popery, retained all its worst vices, a complete

subjection of reason to authority, a weak preference of form to

substance, a childish passion for mummeries, an idolatrous veneration

for the priestly character, and, above all, a merciless intolerance.

This, however, we waive. We will concede that Charles was a good

Protestant; but we say that his Protestantism does not make the

slightest distinction between his case and that of James.

The principles of the Revolution have often been grossly misrepresented,

and never more than in the course of the present year. There is a

certain class of men, who, while they profess to hold in reverence the

great names and great actions of former times, never look at them for

any other purpose than in order to find in them some excuse for existing

abuses. In every venerable precedent they pass by what is essential, and

take only what is accidental: they keep out of sight what is beneficial,

and hold up to public imitation all that is defective. If, in any part

of any great example, there be any thing unsound, these flesh-flies

detect it with an unerring instinct, and dart upon it with a ravenous

delight. If some good end has been attained in spite of them, they feel,

with their prototype, that

“Their labour must be to pervert that end,

And out of good still to find means of evil.”

To the blessings which England has derived from the Revolution these

people are utterly insensible. The expulsion of a tyrant, the solemn

recognition of popular rights, liberty, security, toleration, all go for

nothing with them. One sect there was, which, from unfortunate temporary

causes, it was thought necessary to keep under close restraint. One part

of the empire there was so unhappily circumstanced, that at that time

its misery was necessary to our happiness, and its slavery to our

freedom. These are the parts of the Revolution which the politicians of

whom we speak love to contemplate, and which seem to them not indeed

to vindicate, but in some degree to palliate, the good which it has

produced. Talk to them of Naples, of Spain, or of South America. They

stand forth zealots for the doctrine of Divine Right which has now

come back to us, like a thief from transportation, under the alias of

Legitimacy. But mention the miseries of Ireland. Then William is a

hero. Then Somers and Shrewsbury are great men. Then the Revolution is a

glorious era. The very same persons, who, in this country never omit an

opportunity of reviving every wretched Jacobite slander respecting the

Whigs of that period, have no sooner crossed St. George’s Channel, than

they begin to fill their bumpers to the glorious and immortal memory.

They may truly boast that they look not at men, but at measures. So that

evil be done, they care not who does it; the arbitrary Charles, or the

liberal William, Ferdinand the Catholic, or Frederic the Protestant. On

such occasions their deadliest opponents may reckon upon their candid

construction. The bold assertions of these people have of late impressed

a large portion of the public with an opinion that James the Second was

expelled simply because he was a Catholic, and that the Revolution was

essentially a Protestant Revolution.

But this certainly was not the case; nor can any person who has acquired

more knowledge of the history of those times than is to be found

in Goldsmith’s Abridgement believe that, if James had held his own

religious opinions without wishing to make proselytes, or if, wishing

even to make proselytes, he had contented himself with exerting only his

constitutional influence for that purpose, the Prince of Orange would

ever have been invited over. Our ancestors, we suppose, knew their own

meaning; and, if we may believe them, their hostility was primarily not

to popery, but to tyranny. They did not drive out a tyrant because he

was a Catholic; but they excluded Catholics from the crown, because they

thought them likely to be tyrants. The ground on which they, in their

famous resolution, declared the throne vacant, was this, “that James had

broken the fundamental laws of the kingdom.” Every man, therefore,

who approves of the Revolution of 1688 must hold that the breach of

fundamental laws on the part of the sovereign justifies resistance. The

question, then, is this. Had Charles the First broken the fundamental

laws of England?

No person can answer in the negative, unless he refuses credit, not

merely to all the accusations brought against Charles by his opponents,

but to the narratives of the warmest Royalists, and to the confessions

of the King himself. If there be any truth in any historian of any

party, who has related the events of that reign, the conduct of Charles,

from his accession to the meeting of the Long Parliament, had been a

continued course of oppression and treachery. Let those who applaud

the Revolution and condemn the Rebellion, mention one act of James the

Second to which a parallel is not to be found in the history of

his father. Let them lay their fingers on a single article in the

Declaration of Right, presented by the two Houses to William and Mary,

which Charles is not acknowledged to have violated. He had, according

to the testimony of his own friends, usurped the functions of the

legislature, raised taxes without the consent of parliament, and

quartered troops on the people in the most illegal and vexatious

manner. Not a single session of parliament had passed without some

unconstitutional attack on the freedom of debate; the right of petition

was grossly violated; arbitrary judgments, exorbitant fines, and

unwarranted imprisonments were grievances of daily occurrence. If these

things do not justify resistance, the Revolution was treason; if they

do, the Great Rebellion was laudable.

But it is said, why not adopt milder measures? Why, after the King

had consented to so many reforms, and renounced so many oppressive

prerogatives, did the Parliament continue to rise in their demands at

the risk of provoking a civil war? The ship-money had been given up.

The Star-Chamber had been abolished. Provision had been made for the

frequent convocation and secure deliberation of parliaments. Why not

pursue an end confessedly good by peaceable and regular means? We recur

again to the analogy of the Revolution. Why was James driven from the

throne? Why was he not retained upon conditions? He too had offered to

call a free parliament and to submit to its decision all the matters

in dispute. Yet we are in the habit of praising our forefathers, who

preferred a revolution, a disputed succession, a dynasty of strangers,

twenty years of foreign and intestine war, a standing army, and a

national debt, to the rule, however restricted, of a tried and proved

tyrant. The Long Parliament acted on the same principle, and is entitled

to the same praise. They could not trust the King. He had no doubt

passed salutary laws; but what assurance was there that he would not

break them? He had renounced oppressive prerogatives but where was the

security that he would not resume them? The nation had to deal with a

man whom no tie could bind, a man who made and broke promises with equal

facility, a man whose honour had been a hundred times pawned, and never

redeemed.

Here, indeed, the Long Parliament stands on still stronger ground

than the Convention of 1688. No action of James can be compared to the

conduct of Charles with respect to the Petition of Right. The Lords and

Commons present him with a bill in which the constitutional limits of

his power are marked out. He hesitates; he evades; at last he bargains

to give his assent for five subsidies. The bill receives his solemn

assent; the subsidies are voted; but no sooner is the tyrant relieved,

than he returns at once to all the arbitrary measures which he had bound

himself to abandon, and violates all the clauses of the very Act which

he had been paid to pass.

For more than ten years the people had seen the rights which were theirs

by a double claim, by immemorial inheritance and by recent purchase,

infringed by the perfidious king who had recognised them. At length

circumstances compelled Charles to summon another parliament: another

chance was given to our fathers: were they to throw it away as they had

thrown away the former? Were they again to be cozened by le Roi le

veut? Were they again to advance their money on pledges which had been

forfeited over and over again? Were they to lay a second Petition of

Right at the foot of the throne, to grant another lavish aid in exchange

for another unmeaning ceremony, and then to take their departure, till,

after ten years more of fraud and oppression, their prince should again

require a supply, and again repay it with a perjury? They were compelled

to choose whether they would trust a tyrant or conquer him. We think

that they chose wisely and nobly.

The advocates of Charles, like the advocates of other malefactors

against whom overwhelming evidence is produced, generally decline

all controversy about the facts, and content themselves with calling

testimony to character. He had so many private virtues! And had James

the Second no private virtues? Was Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest

enemies themselves being judges, destitute of private virtues? And what,

after all, are the virtues ascribed to Charles? A religious zeal, not

more sincere than that of his son, and fully as weak and narrow-minded,

and a few of the ordinary household decencies which half the tombstones

in England claim for those who lie beneath them. A good father! A

good husband! Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecution,

tyranny, and falsehood!

We charge him with having broken his coronation oath; and we are told

that he kept his marriage vow! We accuse him of having given up

his people to the merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and

hard-hearted of prelates; and the defence is, that he took his little

son on his knee and kissed him! We censure him for having violated the

articles of the Petition of Right, after having, for good and valuable

consideration, promised to observe them; and we are informed that he was

accustomed to hear prayers at six o’clock in the morning! It is to such

considerations as these, together with his Vandyck dress, his handsome

face, and his peaked beard, that he owes, we verily believe, most of his

popularity with the present generation.

For ourselves, we own that we do not understand the common phrase, a

good man, but a bad king. We can as easily conceive a good man and an

unnatural father, or a good man and a treacherous friend. We cannot,

in estimating the character of an individual, leave out of our

consideration his conduct in the most important of all human relations;

and if in that relation we find him to have been selfish, cruel, and

deceitful, we shall take the liberty to call him a bad man, in spite of

all his temperance at table, and all his regularity at chapel.

We cannot refrain from adding a few words respecting a topic on which

the defenders of Charles are fond of dwelling. If, they say, he governed

his people ill, he at least governed them after the example of his

predecessors. If he violated their privileges, it was because those

privileges had not been accurately defined. No act of oppression has

ever been imputed to him which has not a parallel in the annals of

the Tudors. This point Hume has laboured, with an art which is as

discreditable in a historical work as it would be admirable in a

forensic address. The answer is short, clear, and decisive. Charles

had assented to the Petition of Right. He had renounced the oppressive

powers said to have been exercised by his predecessors, and he had

renounced them for money. He was not entitled to set up his antiquated

claims against his own recent release.

These arguments are so obvious, that it may seem superfluous to dwell

upon them. But those who have observed how much the events of that time

are misrepresented and misunderstood will not blame us for stating

the case simply. It is a case of which the simplest statement is the

strongest.

The enemies of the Parliament, indeed, rarely choose to take issue on

the great points of the question. They content themselves with exposing

some of the crimes and follies to which public commotions necessarily

give birth. They bewail the unmerited fate of Strafford. They execrate

the lawless violence of the army. They laugh at the Scriptural names

of the preachers. Major-generals fleecing their districts; soldiers

revelling on the spoils of a ruined peasantry; upstarts, enriched by

the public plunder, taking possession of the hospitable firesides and

hereditary trees of the old gentry; boys smashing the beautiful windows

of cathedrals; Quakers riding naked through the market-place;

Fifth-monarchy-men shouting for King Jesus; agitators lecturing from the

tops of tubs on the fate of Agag;--all these, they tell us, were the

offspring of the Great Rebellion.

Be it so. We are not careful to answer in this matter. These charges,

were they infinitely more important, would not alter our opinion of

an event which alone has made us to differ from the slaves who crouch

beneath despotic sceptres. Many evils, no doubt, were produced by the

civil war. They were the price of our liberty. Has the acquisition been

worth the sacrifice? It is the nature of the Devil of tyranny to

tear and rend the body which he leaves. Are the miseries of continued

possession less horrible than the struggles of the tremendous exorcism?

If it were possible that a people brought up under an intolerant and

arbitrary system could subvert that system without acts of cruelty

and folly, half the objections to despotic power would be removed.

We should, in that case, be compelled to acknowledge that it at least

produces no pernicious effects on the intellectual and moral character

of a nation. We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions.

But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a

revolution was necessary. The violence of those outrages will always

be proportioned to the ferocity and ignorance of the people; and

the ferocity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the

oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to

live. Thus it was in our civil war. The heads of the church and state

reaped only that which they had sown. The Government had prohibited free

discussion: it had done its best to keep the people unacquainted with

their duties and their rights. The retribution was just and natural.

If our rulers suffered from popular ignorance, it was because they had

themselves taken away the key of knowledge. If they were assailed with

blind fury, it was because they had exacted an equally blind submission.

It is the character of such revolutions that we always see the worst of

them at first. Till men have been some time free, they know not how to

use their freedom. The natives of wine countries are generally sober. In

climates where wine is a rarity intemperance abounds. A newly liberated

people may be compared to a northern army encamped on the Rhine or the

Xeres. It is said that, when soldiers in such a situation first

find themselves able to indulge without restraint in such a rare and

expensive luxury, nothing is to be seen but intoxication. Soon, however,

plenty teaches discretion; and, after wine has been for a few months

their daily fare, they become more temperate than they had ever been in

their own country. In the same manner, the final and permanent fruits

of liberty are wisdom, moderation, and mercy. Its immediate effects are

often atrocious crimes, conflicting errors, scepticism on points the

most clear, dogmatism on points the most mysterious. It is just at

this crisis that its enemies love to exhibit it. They pull down the

scaffolding from the half-finished edifice. They point to the flying

dust, the falling bricks, the comfortless rooms, the frightful

irregularity of the whole appearance; and then ask in scorn where

the promised splendour and comfort is to be found. If such miserable

sophisms were to prevail, there would never be a good house or a good

government in the world.

Ariosto tells a pretty story of a fairy, who, by some mysterious law of

her nature, was condemned to appear at certain seasons in the form of a

foul and poisonous snake. Those who injured her during the period of

her disguise were for ever excluded from participation in the blessings

which she bestowed. But to those who, in spite of her loathsome aspect,

pitied and protected her, she afterwards revealed herself in the

beautiful and celestial form which was natural to her, accompanied their

steps, granted all their wishes, filled their houses with wealth, made

them happy in love and victorious in war. Such a spirit is Liberty. At

times she takes the form of a hateful reptile. She grovels, she hisses,

she stings. But woe to those who in disgust shall venture to crush her!

And happy are those who, having dared to receive her in her degraded and

frightful shape, shall at length be rewarded by her in the time of her

beauty and her glory!

There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom

produces; and that cure is freedom. When a prisoner first leaves his

cell he cannot bear the light of day: he is unable to discriminate

colours, or recognise faces. But the remedy is, not to remand him into

his dungeon, but to accustom him to the rays of the sun. The blaze of

truth and liberty may at first dazzle and bewilder nations which have

become half blind in the house of bondage. But let them gaze on, and

they will soon be able to bear it. In a few years men learn to reason.

The extreme violence of opinion subsides. Hostile theories correct each

other. The scattered elements of truth cease to contend, and begin to

coalesce. And at length a system of justice and order is educed out of

the chaos.

Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a

self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are

fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old

story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to

swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in

slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.

Therefore it is that we decidedly approve of the conduct of Milton and

the other wise and good men who, in spite of much that was ridiculous

and hateful in the conduct of their associates, stood firmly by the

cause of Public Liberty. We are not aware that the poet has been charged

with personal participation in any of the blameable excesses of that

time, The favourite topic of his enemies is the line of conduct which

he pursued with regard to the execution of the King. Of that celebrated

proceeding we by no means approve. Still we must say, in justice to

the many eminent persons who concurred in it, and in justice more

particularly to the eminent person who defended it, that nothing can be

more absurd than the imputations which, for the last hundred and sixty

years, it has been the fashion to cast upon the Regicides. We have,

throughout, abstained from appealing to first principles. We will

not appeal to them now. We recur again to the parallel case of the

Revolution. What essential distinction can be drawn between

the execution of the father and the deposition of the son? What

constitutional maxim is there which applies to the former and not to

the latter? The King can do no wrong. If so, James was as innocent as

Charles could have been. The minister only ought to be responsible for

the acts of the Sovereign. If so, why not impeach Jeffreys and

retain James? The person of a king is sacred. Was the person of James

considered sacred at the Boyne? To discharge cannon against an army

in which a king is known to be posted is to approach pretty near to

regicide. Charles, too, it should always be remembered, was put to death

by men who had been exasperated by the hostilities of several years,

and who had never been bound to him by any other tie than that which

was common to them with all their fellow-citizens. Those who drove James

from his throne, who seduced his army, who alienated his friends, who

first imprisoned him in his palace, and then turned him out of it, who

broke in upon his very slumbers by imperious messages, who pursued him

with fire and sword from one part of the empire to another, who hanged,

drew, and quartered his adherents, and attainted his innocent heir, were

his nephew and his two daughters. When we reflect on all these things,

we are at a loss to conceive how the same persons who, on the fifth of

November, thank God for wonderfully conducting his servant William, and

for making all opposition fall before him until he became our King and

Governor, can, on the thirtieth of January, contrive to be afraid that

the blood of the Royal Martyr may be visited on themselves and their

children.

We disapprove, we repeat, of the execution of Charles; not because the

constitution exempts the King from responsibility, for we know that all

such maxims, however excellent, have their exceptions; nor because

we feel any peculiar interest in his character, for we think that his

sentence describes him with perfect justice as “a tyrant, a traitor,

a murderer, and a public enemy”; but because we are convinced that the

measure was most injurious to the cause of freedom. He whom it removed

was a captive and a hostage: his heir, to whom the allegiance of every

Royalist was instantly transferred, was at large. The Presbyterians

could never have been perfectly reconciled to the father; they had

no such rooted enmity to the son. The great body of the people, also,

contemplated that proceeding with feelings which, however unreasonable,

no government could safely venture to outrage.

But though we think the conduct of the Regicides blameable, that of

Milton appears to us in a very different light. The deed was done. It

could not be undone. The evil was incurred; and the object was to render

it as small as possible. We censure the chiefs of the army for not

yielding to the popular opinion; but we cannot censure Milton for

wishing to change that opinion. The very feeling which would have

restrained us from committing the act would have led us, after it

had been committed, to defend it against the ravings of servility and

superstition. For the sake of public liberty, we wish that the thing had

not been done, while the people disapproved of it. But, for the sake of

public liberty, we should also have wished the people to approve of it

when it was done. If anything more were wanting to the justification

of Milton, the book of Salmasius would furnish it. That miserable

performance is now with justice considered only as a beacon to

word-catchers, who wish to become statesmen. The celebrity of the man

who refuted it, the “Aeneae magni dextra,” gives it all its fame with

the present generation. In that age the state of things was different.

It was not then fully understood how vast an interval separates the mere

classical scholar from the political philosopher. Nor can it be doubted

that a treatise which, bearing the name of so eminent a critic, attacked

the fundamental principles of all free governments, must, if suffered to

remain unanswered, have produced a most pernicious effect on the public

mind.

We wish to add a few words relative to another subject, on which

the enemies of Milton delight to dwell, his conduct during the

administration of the Protector. That an enthusiastic votary of liberty

should accept office under a military usurper seems, no doubt, at first

sight, extraordinary. But all the circumstances in which the country was

then placed were extraordinary. The ambition of Oliver was of no vulgar

kind. He never seems to have coveted despotic power. He at first fought

sincerely and manfully for the Parliament, and never deserted it, till

it had deserted its duty. If he dissolved it by force, it was not

till he found that the few members who remained after so many deaths,

secessions, and expulsions, were desirous to appropriate to themselves

a power which they held only in trust, and to inflict upon England the

curse of a Venetian oligarchy. But even when thus placed by violence

at the head of affairs, he did not assume unlimited power. He gave the

country a constitution far more perfect than any which had at that time

been known in the world. He reformed the representative system in a

manner which has extorted praise even from Lord Clarendon. For himself

he demanded indeed the first place in the commonwealth; but with powers

scarcely so great as those of a Dutch stadtholder, or an American

president. He gave the parliament a voice in the appointment of

ministers, and left to it the whole legislative authority, not even

reserving to himself a veto on its enactments; and he did not require

that the chief magistracy should be hereditary in his family. Thus far,

we think, if the circumstances of the time and the opportunities which

he had of aggrandising himself be fairly considered, he will not lose

by comparison with Washington or Bolivar. Had his moderation been met by

corresponding moderation, there is no reason to think that he would have

overstepped the line which he had traced for himself. But when he found

that his parliaments questioned the authority under which they met, and

that he was in danger of being deprived of the restricted power which

was absolutely necessary to his personal safety, then, it must be

acknowledged, he adopted a more arbitrary policy.

Yet, though we believe that the intentions of Cromwell were at first

honest, though we believe that he was driven from the noble course

which he had marked out for himself by the almost irresistible force of

circumstances, though we admire, in common with all men of all parties,

the ability and energy of his splendid administration, we are not

pleading for arbitrary and lawless power, even in his hands. We know

that a good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

But we suspect, that at the time of which we speak, the violence of

religious and political enmities rendered a stable and happy settlement

next to impossible. The choice lay, not between Cromwell and liberty,

but between Cromwell and the Stuarts. That Milton chose well, no man can

doubt who fairly compares the events of the Protectorate with those of

the thirty years which succeeded it, the darkest and most disgraceful

in the English annals. Cromwell was evidently laying, though in an

irregular manner, the foundations of an admirable system. Never before

had religious liberty and the freedom of discussion been enjoyed in a

greater degree. Never had the national honour been better upheld abroad,

or the seat of justice better filled at home. And it was rarely that any

opposition which stopped short of open rebellion provoked the resentment

of the liberal and magnanimous usurper. The institutions which he had

established, as set down in the Instrument of Government, and the Humble

Petition and Advice, were excellent. His practice, it is true, too often

departed from the theory of these institutions. But, had he lived a few

years longer, it is probable that his institutions would have survived

him, and that his arbitrary practice would have died with him. His power

had not been consecrated by ancient prejudices. It was upheld only by

his great personal qualities. Little, therefore, was to be dreaded from

a second protector, unless he were also a second Oliver Cromwell. The

events which followed his decease are the most complete vindication

of those who exerted themselves to uphold his authority. His death

dissolved the whole frame of society. The army rose against the

Parliament, the different corps of the army against each other. Sect

raved against sect. Party plotted against party, The Presbyterians, in

their eagerness to be revenged on the Independents, sacrificed their

own liberty, and deserted all their old principles. Without casting one

glance on the past, or requiring one stipulation for the future, they

threw down their freedom at the feet of the most frivolous and heartless

of tyrants.

Then came those days, never to be recalled without a blush, the days

of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish

talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow

minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The King

cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank into a

viceroy of France, and pocketed, with complacent infamy, her degrading

insults, and her more degrading gold. The caresses of harlots, and the

jests of buffoons, regulated the policy of the State. The Government had

just ability enough to deceive, and just religion enough to persecute.

The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier,

and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. In every high place,

worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch; and England

propitiated those obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and

bravest children. Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace,

till the race accursed of God and man was a second time driven forth,

to wander on the face of the earth, and to be a by-word and a shaking of

the head to the nations.

Most of the remarks which we have hitherto made on the public character

of Milton, apply to him only as one of a large body. We shall proceed

to notice some of the peculiarities which distinguished him from his

contemporaries. And, for that purpose, it is necessary to take a short

survey of the parties into which the political world was at that time

divided. We must premise, that our observations are intended to apply

only to those who adhered, from a sincere preference, to one or to the

other side. In days of public commotion, every faction, like an Oriental

army, is attended by a crowd of camp-followers, an useless and heartless

rabble, who prowl round its line of march in the hope of picking up

something under its protection, but desert it in the day of battle, and

often join to exterminate it after a defeat. England, at the time of

which we are treating, abounded with fickle and selfish politicians, who

transferred their support to every government as it rose, who kissed the

hand of the King in 1640, and spat in his face in 1649, who shouted with

equal glee when Cromwell was inaugurated in Westminster Hall, and when

he was dug up to be hanged at Tyburn, who dined on calves’ heads or

stuck-up oak-branches, as circumstances altered, without the slightest

shame or repugnance. These we leave out of the account. We take

our estimate of parties from those who really deserved to be called

partisans.

We would speak first of the Puritans, the most remarkable body of men,

perhaps, which the world has ever produced. The odious and ridiculous

parts of their character lie on the surface. He that runs may read them;

nor have there been wanting attentive and malicious observers to point

them out. For many years after the Restoration, they were the theme

of unmeasured invective and derision. They were exposed to the utmost

licentiousness of the press and of the stage, at the time when the press

and the stage were most licentious. They were not men of letters; they

were, as a body, unpopular; they could not defend themselves; and the

public would not take them under its protection. They were therefore

abandoned, without reserve, to the tender mercies of the satirists

and dramatists. The ostentatious simplicity of their dress, their sour

aspect, their nasal twang, their stiff posture, their long graces, their

Hebrew names, the Scriptural phrases which they introduced on every

occasion, their contempt of human learning, their detestation of polite

amusements, were indeed fair game for the laughers. But it is not from

the laughers alone that the philosophy of history is to be learnt.

And he who approaches this subject should carefully guard against the

influence of that potent ridicule which has already misled so many

excellent writers.

“Ecco il fonte del riso, ed ecco il rio Che mortali perigli in so

contiene: Hor qui tener a fren nostro desio, Ed esser cauti molto a noi

conviene.”

Those who roused the people to resistance, who directed their measures

through a long series of eventful years, who formed, out of the most

unpromising materials, the finest army that Europe had ever seen, who

trampled down King, Church, and Aristocracy, who, in the short intervals

of domestic sedition and rebellion, made the name of England terrible to

every nation on the face of the earth, were no vulgar fanatics. Most

of their absurdities were mere external badges, like the signs of

freemasonry, or the dresses of friars. We regret that these badges were

not more attractive. We regret that a body to whose courage and talents

mankind has owed inestimable obligations had not the lofty elegance

which distinguished some of the adherents of Charles the First, or

the easy good-breeding for which the court of Charles the Second was

celebrated. But, if we must make our choice, we shall, like Bassanio in

the play, turn from the specious caskets which contain only the Death’s

head and the Fool’s head, and fix on the plain leaden chest which

conceals the treasure.

The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from

the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not

content with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling Providence,

they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being, for

whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too

minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was with them the great

end of existence. They rejected with contempt the ceremonious homage

which other sects substituted for the pure worship of the soul. Instead

of catching occasional glimpses of the Deity through an obscuring veil,

they aspired to gaze full on his intolerable brightness, and to commune

with him face to face. Hence originated their contempt for terrestrial

distinctions. The difference between the greatest and the meanest of

mankind seemed to vanish, when compared with the boundless interval

which separated the whole race from him on whom their own eyes were

constantly fixed. They recognised no title to superiority but

his favour; and, confident of that favour, they despised all the

accomplishments and all the dignities of the world. If they were

unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets, they were

deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the

registers of heralds, they were recorded in the Book of Life. If their

steps were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials, legions of

ministering angels had charge over them. Their palaces were houses not

made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory which should never fade

away. On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles and priests, they looked

down with contempt: for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious

treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language, nobles by the right

of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier

hand. The very meanest of them was a being to whose fate a mysterious

and terrible importance belonged, on whose slightest action the spirits

of light and darkness looked with anxious interest, who had been

destined, before heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity

which should continue when heaven and earth should have passed away.

Events which shortsighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes,

had been ordained on his account. For his sake empires had risen, and

flourished, and decayed. For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed his

will by the pen of the evangelist, and the harp of the prophet. He had

been wrested by no common deliverer from the grasp of no common foe. He

had been ransomed by the sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no

earthly sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been darkened, that

the rocks had been rent, that the dead had risen, that all nature had

shuddered at the sufferings of her expiring God.

Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men, the one all

self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other proud, calm,

inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his

Maker: but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional

retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. He was

half-maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres

of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the

Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. Like

Vane, he thought himself intrusted with the sceptre of the millennial

year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God

had hid his face from him. But when he took his seat in the council, or

girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings of the soul had

left no perceptible trace behind them. People who saw nothing of the

godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their

groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had

little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate or

in the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil and military

affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some

writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but

which were in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of

their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One

overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition

and fear. Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms. They had

their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but

not for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had made them Stoics, had

cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised

them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might

lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means.

They went through the world, like Sir Artegal’s iron man Talus with

his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human

beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible

to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon,

not to be withstood by any barrier.

Such we believe to have been the character of the Puritans. We perceive

the absurdity of their manners. We dislike the sullen gloom of their

domestic habits. We acknowledge that the tone of their minds was often

injured by straining after things too high for mortal reach: and we know

that, in spite of their hatred of Popery, they too often fell into the

worst vices of that bad system, intolerance and extravagant austerity,

that they had their anchorites and their crusades, their Dunstans and

their De Montforts, their Dominics and their Escobars. Yet, when all

circumstances are taken into consideration, we do not hesitate to

pronounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, and an useful body.

The Puritans espoused the cause of civil liberty mainly because it was

the cause of religion. There was another party, by no means numerous,

but distinguished by learning and ability, which acted with them on very

different principles. We speak of those whom Cromwell was accustomed

to call the Heathens, men who were, in the phraseology of that time,

doubting Thomases or careless Gallios with regard to religious subjects,

but passionate worshippers of freedom. Heated by the study of ancient

literature, they set up their country as their idol, and proposed to

themselves the heroes of Plutarch as their examples. They seem to have

borne some resemblance to the Brissotines of the French Revolution. But

it is not very easy to draw the line of distinction between them and

their devout associates, whose tone and manner they sometimes found

it convenient to affect, and sometimes, it is probable, imperceptibly

adopted.

We now come to the Royalists. We shall attempt to speak of them, as we

have spoken of their antagonists, with perfect candour. We shall not

charge upon a whole party the profligacy and baseness of the horseboys,

gamblers and bravoes, whom the hope of licence and plunder attracted

from all the dens of Whitefriars to the standard of Charles, and

who disgraced their associates by excesses which, under the stricter

discipline of the Parliamentary armies, were never tolerated. We will

select a more favourable specimen. Thinking as we do that the cause of

the King was the cause of bigotry and tyranny, we yet cannot refrain

from looking with complacency on the character of the honest old

Cavaliers. We feel a national pride in comparing them with the

instruments which the despots of other countries are compelled

to employ, with the mutes who throng their ante-chambers, and the

Janissaries who mount guard at their gates. Our royalist countrymen were

not heartless dangling courtiers, bowing at every step, and simpering

at every word. They were not mere machines for destruction dressed up in

uniforms, caned into skill, intoxicated into valour, defending

without love, destroying without hatred. There was a freedom in their

subserviency, a nobleness in their very degradation. The sentiment of

individual independence was strong within them. They were indeed misled,

but by no base or selfish motive. Compassion and romantic honour, the

prejudices of childhood, and the venerable names of history, threw over

them a spell potent as that of Duessa; and, like the Red-Cross Knight,

they thought that they were doing battle for an injured beauty, while

they defended a false and loathsome sorceress. In truth they scarcely

entered at all into the merits of the political question. It was not for

a treacherous king or an intolerant church that they fought, but for the

old banner which had waved in so many battles over the heads of their

fathers, and for the altars at which they had received the hands

of their brides. Though nothing could be more erroneous than their

political opinions, they possessed, in a far greater degree than their

adversaries, those qualities which are the grace of private life. With

many of the vices of the Round Table, they had also many of its virtues,

courtesy, generosity, veracity, tenderness, and respect for women. They

had far more both of profound and of polite learning than the Puritans.

Their manners were more engaging, their tempers more amiable, their

tastes more elegant, and their households more cheerful.

Milton did not strictly belong to any of the classes which we have

described. He was not a Puritan. He was not a freethinker. He was not

a Royalist. In his character the noblest qualities of every party were

combined in harmonious union. From the Parliament and from the Court,

from the conventicle and from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and

sepulchral circles of the Roundheads, and from the Christmas revel of

the hospitable Cavalier, his nature selected and drew to itself whatever

was great and good, while it rejected all the base and pernicious

ingredients by which those finer elements were defiled. Like the

Puritans, he lived

“As ever in his great taskmaster’s eye.”

Like them, he kept his mind continually fixed on an Almighty judge and

an eternal reward. And hence he acquired their contempt of external

circumstances, their fortitude, their tranquillity, their inflexible

resolution. But not the coolest sceptic or the most profane scoffer was

more perfectly free from the contagion of their frantic delusions, their

savage manners, their ludicrous jargon, their scorn of science, and

their aversion to pleasure. Hating tyranny with a perfect hatred, he

had nevertheless all the estimable and ornamental qualities which were

almost entirely monopolised by the party of the tyrant. There was none

who had a stronger sense of the value of literature, a finer relish for

every elegant amusement, or a more chivalrous delicacy of honour

and love. Though his opinions were democratic, his tastes and his

associations were such as harmonise best with monarchy and aristocracy.

He was under the influence of all the feelings by which the gallant

Cavaliers were misled. But of those feelings he was the master and

not the slave. Like the hero of Homer, he enjoyed all the pleasures of

fascination; but he was not fascinated. He listened to the song of the

Syrens; yet he glided by without being seduced to their fatal shore. He

tasted the cup of Circe; but he bore about him a sure antidote against

the effects of its bewitching sweetness. The illusions which captivated

his imagination never impaired his reasoning powers. The statesman

was proof against the splendour, the solemnity, and the romance

which enchanted the poet. Any person who will contrast the sentiments

expressed in his treatises on Prelacy with the exquisite lines on

ecclesiastical architecture and music in the Penseroso, which was

published about the same time, will understand our meaning. This is an

inconsistency which, more than anything else, raises his character in

our estimation, because it shows how many private tastes and feelings he

sacrificed, in order to do what he considered his duty to mankind. It is

the very struggle of the noble Othello. His heart relents; but his

hand is firm. He does nought in hate, but all in honour. He kisses the

beautiful deceiver before he destroys her.

That from which the public character of Milton derives its great and

peculiar splendour, still remains to be mentioned. If he exerted himself

to overthrow a forsworn king and a persecuting hierarchy, he exerted

himself in conjunction with others. But the glory of the battle which he

fought for the species of freedom which is the most valuable, and which

was then the least understood, the freedom of the human mind, is all

his own. Thousands and tens of thousands among his contemporaries raised

their voices against Ship-money and the Star-Chamber. But there were few

indeed who discerned the more fearful evils of moral and intellectual

slavery, and the benefits which would result from the liberty of the

press and the unfettered exercise of private judgment. These were the

objects which Milton justly conceived to be the most important. He was

desirous that the people should think for themselves as well as tax

themselves, and should be emancipated from the dominion of prejudice

as well as from that of Charles. He knew that those who, with the best

intentions, overlooked these schemes of reform, and contented themselves

with pulling down the King and imprisoning the malignants, acted

like the heedless brothers in his own poem, who in their eagerness to

disperse the train of the sorcerer, neglected the means of liberating

the captive. They thought only of conquering when they should have

thought of disenchanting.

“Oh, ye mistook! Ye should have snatch’d his wand And bound him fast.

Without the rod reversed, And backward mutters of dissevering power, We

cannot free the lady that sits here Bound in strong fetters fix’d and

motionless.”

To reverse the rod, to spell the charm backward, to break the ties which

bound a stupefied people to the seat of enchantment, was the noble aim

of Milton. To this all his public conduct was directed. For this he

joined the Presbyterians; for this he forsook them. He fought their

perilous battle; but he turned away with disdain from their insolent

triumph. He saw that they, like those whom they had vanquished, were

hostile to the liberty of thought. He therefore joined the Independents,

and called upon Cromwell to break the secular chain, and to save free

conscience from the paw of the Presbyterian wolf. With a view to the

same great object, he attacked the licensing system, in that sublime

treatise which every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and

as frontlets between his eyes. His attacks were, in general, directed

less against particular abuses than against those deeply-seated errors

on which almost all abuses are founded, the servile worship of eminent

men and the irrational dread of innovation.

That he might shake the foundations of these debasing sentiments

more effectually, he always selected for himself the boldest literary

services. He never came up in the rear, when the outworks had been

carried and the breach entered. He pressed into the forlorn hope. At

the beginning of the changes, he wrote with incomparable energy and

eloquence against the bishops. But, when his opinion seemed likely to

prevail, he passed on to other subjects, and abandoned prelacy to the

crowd of writers who now hastened to insult a falling party. There is no

more hazardous enterprise than that of bearing the torch of truth into

those dark and infected recesses in which no light has ever shone. But

it was the choice and the pleasure of Milton to penetrate the noisome

vapours, and to brave the terrible explosion. Those who most disapprove

of his opinions must respect the hardihood with which he maintained

them. He, in general, left to others the credit of expounding and

defending the popular parts of his religious and political creed. He

took his own stand upon those which the great body of his countrymen

reprobated as criminal, or derided as paradoxical. He stood up for

divorce and regicide. He attacked the prevailing systems of education.

His radiant and beneficent career resembled that of the god of light and

fertility.

“Nitor in adversum; nec me, qui caetera, vincit Impetus, et rapido

contrarius evehor orbi.”

It is to be regretted that the prose writings of Milton should, in our

time, be so little read. As compositions, they deserve the attention

of every man who wishes to become acquainted with the full power of

the English language. They abound with passages compared with which

the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance. They are

a perfect field of cloth-of-gold. The style is stiff with gorgeous

embroidery. Not even in the earlier books of the Paradise Lost has the

great poet ever risen higher than in those parts of his controversial

works in which his feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts

of devotional and lyric rapture. It is, to borrow his own majestic

language, “a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies.”

We had intended to look more closely at these performances, to analyse

the peculiarities of the diction, to dwell at some length on the sublime

wisdom of the Areopagitica and the nervous rhetoric of the Iconoclast,

and to point out some of those magnificent passages which occur in the

Treatise of Reformation, and the Animadversions on the Remonstrant.

But the length to which our remarks have already extended renders this

impossible.

We must conclude. And yet we can scarcely tear ourselves away from the

subject. The days immediately following the publication of this relic of

Milton appear to be peculiarly set apart, and consecrated to his memory.

And we shall scarcely be censured if, on this his festival, we be found

lingering near his shrine, how worthless soever may be the offering

which we bring to it. While this book lies on our table, we seem to be

contemporaries of the writer. We are transported a hundred and fifty

years back. We can almost fancy that we are visiting him in his small

lodging; that we see him sitting at the old organ beneath the faded

green hangings; that we can catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, rolling

in vain to find the day; that we are reading in the lines of his

noble countenance the proud and mournful history of his glory and his

affliction. We image to ourselves the breathless silence in which we

should listen to his slightest word, the passionate veneration with

which we should kneel to kiss his hand and weep upon it, the earnestness

with which we should endeavour to console him, if indeed such a spirit

could need consolation, for the neglect of an age unworthy of his

talents and his virtues, the eagerness with which we should contest

with his daughters, or with his Quaker friend Elwood, the privilege

of reading Homer to him, or of taking down the immortal accents which

flowed from his lips.

These are perhaps foolish feelings. Yet we cannot be ashamed of them;

nor shall we be sorry if what we have written shall in any degree excite

them in other minds. We are not much in the habit of idolising either

the living or the dead. And we think that there is no more certain

indication of a weak and ill-regulated intellect than that propensity

which, for want of a better name, we will venture to christen

Boswellism. But there are a few characters which have stood the closest

scrutiny and the severest tests, which have been tried in the furnace

and have proved pure, which have been weighed in the balance and have

not been found wanting, which have been declared sterling by the general

consent of mankind, and which are visibly stamped with the image and

superscription of the Most High. These great men we trust that we know

how to prize; and of these was Milton. The sight of his books, the sound

of his name, are pleasant to us. His thoughts resemble those celestial

fruits and flowers which the Virgin Martyr of Massinger sent down from

the gardens of Paradise to the earth, and which were distinguished

from the productions of other soils, not only by superior bloom and

sweetness, but by miraculous efficacy to invigorate and to heal. They

are powerful, not only to delight, but to elevate and purify. Nor do we

envy the man who can study either the life or the writings of the great

poet and patriot, without aspiring to emulate, not indeed the sublime

works with which his genius has enriched our literature, but the zeal

with which he laboured for the public good, the fortitude with which he

endured every private calamity, the lofty disdain with which he looked

down on temptations and dangers, the deadly hatred which he bore to

bigots and tyrants, and the faith which he so sternly kept with his

country and with his fame.