After the conversation between the Angel and Adam in the bower, it may
be well presumed that our first parent waited on his heavenly guest at
his departure to some little distance from it, till he began to take his
flight towards heaven; and therefore "sagaciously" thinks that the poet
could not with propriety say that the angel parted from the _thick
shade_, that is, the _bower_, to go to heaven. But if Adam attended the
Angel no farther than the door or entrance of the bower, then he
shrewdly asks, "How Adam could return to his bower if he was never out
of it?"
Our editor has made a thousand similar corrections in his edition of
Milton! Some have suspected that the same kind intention which prompted
Dryden to persuade Creech to undertake a translation of Horace
influenced those who encouraged our Doctor, in thus exercising his
"sagacity" and "happy conjecture" on the epic of Milton. He is one of
those learned critics who have happily "elucidated their author into
obscurity," and comes nearest to that "true conjectural critic" whose
practice a Portuguese satirist so greatly admired: by which means, if he
be only followed up by future editors, we might have that immaculate
edition, in which little or nothing should be found of the original!
I have collected these few instances as not uninteresting to men of
taste; they may convince us that a scholar may be familiarized to Greek
and Latin, though a stranger to his vernacular literature; and that a
verbal critic may sometimes be successful in his attempts on a _single
word_, though he may be incapable of tasting an _entire sentence_. Let
it also remain as a gibbet on the high roads of literature; that
"conjectural critics" as they pass may not forget the unhappy fate of
Bentley.