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In his translation of Virgil, written when he was about 36 twenty-one years old, may be still found the old manner of continuing the sense ungracefully from verse to verse.

'Then all those

Who in the dark our fury did escape,

Returning, know our borrow'd arms, and shape,
And differing dialect: then their numbers swell
And grow upon us; first Chorobus fell
Before Minerva's altar; next did bleed
Just Ripheus, whom no Trojan did exceed
In virtue, yet the Gods his fate decreed.
Then Hypanis and Dymas, wounded by
Their friends; nor thee, Pantheus, thy piety,
Nor consecrated mitre, from the same

Ill fate could save; my country's funeral flame
And Troy's cold ashes I attest, and call
To witness for myself, that in their fall
No foes, no death, nor danger I declin'd,
Did, and deserv'd no less, my fate to find '.'

From this kind of concatenated metre he afterwards refrained, 37 and taught his followers the art of concluding their sense in couplets2; which has perhaps been with rather too much constancy pursued.

This passage exhibits one of those triplets which are not 38 infrequent in this first essay, but which it is to be supposed his maturer judgement disapproved, since in his latter works he has totally forborne them.

His rhymes are such as seem found without difficulty by 39 following the sense; and are for the most part as exact at

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2

Eng. Poets, ix. 186.

Post, DRYDEN, 217, 290. 'The excellence and dignity of rhyme were never fully known till Mr. Waller taught it; he first made writing easily an art; first showed us to conclude the sense, most commonly, in distichs, which, in the verse of those before him, runs on for so many lines together that the reader is out of breath to overtake it. This sweetness of Mr. Waller's lyrick poesy was afterwards followed in the epick by Sir John Denham in his Cooper's Hill.... But if we owe the invention of it to Mr. Waller, we are acknowledging for the noblest use of it to Sir William Davenant, who at once

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made it perfect in the Siege of Rhodes.' DRYDEN, Works, ii. 137.

Churchill, in The Apology (Works, 1766, i. 72), says that Waller 'In couplets first taught straggling sense to close.'

'When once,' writes Mr. Elwin, 'the change had commenced, there was a constant movement towards uniformity till the utmost verge was reached, and a fresh reaction began.' Pope's Works (Elwin and Courthope), i. 337.

For Young's 'style sometimes concatenated,' see post, YOUNG, 154, and for the concatenation of Akenside's verses,' see post, AKENSIDE,

17.

40

41

42

least as those of other poets, though now and then the reader is shifted off with what he can get.

'O how transform'd!

How much unlike that Hector, who return'd
Clad in Achilles' spoils '!'

And again:

'From thence a thousand lesser poets sprung,
Like petty princes from the fall of Rome"!"

Sometimes the weight of rhyme is laid upon a word too feeble to sustain it:

'Troy confounded falls

From all her glories: if it might have stood
By any power, by this right hand it shou'd3'
'And though my outward state misfortune hath
Deprest thus low, it cannot reach my faith.'

Thus by his fraud and our own faith o'ercome,
A feigned tear destroys us, against whom
Tydides nor Achilles could prevail,

Nor ten years' conflict, nor a thousand sail 5.'

He is not very careful to vary the ends of his verses; in one passage the word die rhymes three couplets in six".

Most of these petty faults are in his first productions, when he was less skilful or, at least, less dexterous in the use of words, and though they had been more frequent they could only have lessened the grace, not the strength of his composition. He is one of the writers that improved our taste and advanced our language, and whom we ought therefore to read with gratitude, though having done much he left much to do.

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APPENDIX H (PAGE 75)

He was married on May 25, 1665. Cunningham, Lives of the Poets, i. 71. Upon some discontent arising from a second match he became crazed for a time, and so consequently contemptible among vain fops.' Ath. Oxon. iii. 825; Aubrey's Brief Lives, i. 219.

'June 10, 1666. He [Pierce] tells me how the Duke of York is wholly given up to his new mistress, my Lady Denham, going at noonday with all his gentlemen with him to visit her in Scotland Yard; she

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Eng. Poets, ix.

2 lb. p. 228.

* 1b. p. 175.
In Of Justice.

181.

3 Ib. p. 181.
5 Ib. p. 179.
In the second

couplet after the last of these six, dies rhymes with flies. Ib. p. 256. In Cooper's Hill, die rhymes two couplets in three. Ib. p. 170.

declaring she will not be his mistress, as Mrs. Price, to go up and down the Privy-stairs, but, will be owned publickly, and so she is.' PEPYS, Diary, iii. 208.

'Jan. 7, 1666-7. Lord Brouncker tells me that my Lady Denham is at last dead. Some suspect her poisoned.' Ib. p. 372.

In the Memoirs of Grammont, 1876, p. 207, Denham is accused of poisoning his wife. According to Aubrey, she was 'poysoned by the Co. of Roc. [Countess of Rochester] with chocolatte.' Brief Lives, i. 219. Butler, after charging him with fraud in his surveyorship, continues :

'All this was done before those days began

In which you were a wise and happy man.

For who e'er liv'd in such a Paradise,

Until fresh straw and darkness op'd your eyes?'

Butler's Genuine Remains, i. 159, Eng. Poets, xiv. 202.

Lord Lisle wrote to Temple on Sept. 26, 1667 :-' If Sir John Denham had not the name of being mad, I believe in most companies he would be thought wittier than ever he was.' Temple's Works, 1757, i. 484.

1

MILTON1

HE Life of Milton has been already written in so many

Terms and with such minute enquiry that I might per

2

haps more properly have contented myself with the addition of a few notes to Mr. Fenton's elegant Abridgement 3, but that a new narrative was thought necessary to the uniformity of this edition.

2 JOHN MILTON was by birth a gentleman *, descended from the proprietors of Milton near Thame in Oxfordshire, one of whom forfeited his estate in the times of York and Lancaster 5.

'Milton's Life was begun in January 1779, and finished in six weeks.' Gent. Mag. 1785, p. 9.

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Malone wrote on April 5, 1779:'Johnson told me, we have had too many honeysuckle lives of Milton, and that his should be in another strain." Hist. MSS. Com. Report xii. App. x. 345.

'Johnson's treatment of Milton,' wrote Cowper, 'is unmerciful to the last degree. A pensioner is not likely to spare a republican; and the Doctor, in order, I suppose, to convince his royal patron of the sincerity of his monarchical principles, has belaboured that great poet's character with the most industrious cruelty." Southey's Cowper's Works, iii. 313.

Pattison after calling Johnson 'a literary bandit,' 'who conspired with one Lauder to stamp out Milton's credit' [Boswell's Johnson, i. 228], continues: 'He afterwards took ample revenge for the mortification of this exposure [of the conspiracy], in his Lives of the Poets, in which he employed all his vigorous powers and consummate skill to write down Milton. He undoubtedly dealt a heavy blow at the poet's reputation.' Pattison's Milton, pp. 217-9.

Landor, on the other hand, wrote: -'In Johnson's estimate [of Milton] I do not perceive the unfairness of which many have complained.' Imag. Conver. (Crump), iv. 243.

2 The following list of the Lives of Milton used by Johnson I have taken from Mr. C. H. Firth's edition of Johnson's Milton, Clarendon Press, 1888, p. 83:-Wood's Ath. Oxon. 1691-2 [Fasti Oxon. 1815, i. 479]; Letters of State written by Milton, with Life, by Edward Phillips, 1694; Life, by John Toland, 1698; Explanatory Notes, &c., on Paradise Lost, with Life, by Jonathan Richardson, 1734; Milton's Prose Works, with Life, by Thomas Birch, 1738; Milton's Poems, with Life, by Thomas Newton, Bishop of Bristol, 1749-52.

Johnson might also have seen Francis Peck's New Memoirs of Milton, 1740, and Biog. Brit. p. 3106. On Aubrey's Brief Lives, ii. 60, Wood's account was based, whose Life of Milton, writes T. Warton, 'is the groundwork of all the Lives. Milton's Poems, ed. T. Warton, 1791, p. 422.

3 Post, FENTON, 14.

4 The arms that John Milton did use and seal his letters with were, Argent a spread eagle with two heads gules, legg'd and beak'd sable.' WOOD, Fasti Oxon. i. 480 n.

5 Johnson's authorities are Phillips (Milton's Letters of State, with Life, p. 5), and Wood (Fasti Oxon. i. 480), whose informant was Aubrey, who had his account from Milton and his relations. Milton's grandfather, writes Wood, 'was descended from

Which side he took I know not; his descendant inherited no veneration for the White Rose.

His grandfather John was keeper of the forest of Shotover, 3 a zealous papist who disinherited his son, because he had forsaken the religion of his ancestors.

His father, John, who was the son disinherited, had recourse 4 for his support to the profession of a scrivener. He was a man eminent for his skill in musick, many of his compositions being still to be found1; and his reputation in his profession was such that he grew rich, and retired to an estate. He had probably more than common literature, as his son addresses him in one of his most elaborate Latin poems 2. He married a gentlewoman of the name of Caston3, a Welsh family, by whom he had two sons, John the poet, and Christopher who studied the law, and adhered, as the law taught him, to the King's party, for which he was awhile persecuted; but having, by his brother's interest, obtained permission to live in quiet, he supported himself so honourably by chamberpractice, that soon after the accession of King James, he was knighted and made a Judge'; but his constitution being too weak for business, he retired before any disreputable compliances became necessary.

He had likewise a daughter Anne, whom he married with 5

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pound for his property now sequestered in turn... His case was protracted for five years.' Ib. iii. 485, 632.

5 Phillips' Milton, p. 6. 'June 2, 1686. New judges, among which was Milton, a Papist (brother to that Milton who wrote for the Regicides), who presumed to take his place without passing the Test.' EVELYN, Diary, ii. 265.

He was appointed in April 1686, on the dismissal of four judges, ‘all violent Tories,' for refusing to support the King's pretensions to the dispensing power. [Post, RoWE, 1.] 'It does not appear that he was ever formally reconciled to the Church of Rome.' MACAULAY, History, ii. 337.

"Not a single dictum of his is recorded in any report book of his time.' HAWKINS, Johnson's Works, 1787, i. 83. See also post, MILTON,

172.

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