regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. He sent his faculties out upon discovery into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence, and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the councils of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven.

"But he could not always be in other worlds he must sometimes revisit earth, and tell of things visible and known. When he cannot raise wonder by the sublimity of his mind, he gives delight by its fertility.

"Whatever be his subject, he never fails to fill the imagination. But his images and descriptions of the scenes or operations of nature do not seem to be always copied from original forms, nor to have the freshness, raciness, and energy of immediate observation. He saw Nature, as Dryden expresses it, through the spectacles of books, and on most occasions calls learning to his assistance. The garden of Eden brings to his mind the vale of Enna where Proserpine was gathering flowers. Satan makes his way through fighting elements like Argo between the Cyanean rocks, or Ulysses between the two Sicilian whirlpools when he shunned Charybdis on the larboard. The mythological allusions have been justly censured as not being always used with notice of their vanity, but they contribute variety to the narration, and produce an alternate exercise of the memory and the fancy. "His smiles are less numerous, and more various than those of his predecessors: but he does

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not confine himself within the limits of rigorous comparison. His great excellence is amplitude, and he expands the adventitious image beyond the dimensions which the occasion required. Thus, comparing the shield of Satan to the orb of the moon, he crowds the imagination with the discovery of the telescope, and all the wonders which the telescope discovers.

"Whatever be done, however, the poet is always great. Our progenitors, in their first state, conversed with angels; even when folly and sin had degraded them, they had not in their humiliation the port of mean suitors; and they rise again to reverential regard when we find that their prayers were heard.

"As human passions did not enter the world before the fall, there is in the "Paradise Lost" little opportunity for the pathetic, but what little there is has not been lost. That passion which is peculiar to rational nature, the anguish arising from the consciousness of transgression, and the horrors attending the sense of the divine displeasure, are very justly described, and forcibly impressed. But the passions are moved only on one occasion. Sublimity is the general and prevailing quality in this poem; sublimity variously modified, sometimes descriptive, sometimes argumentative.

"The defects and faults" of Paradise Lost," for faults and defects every work of man must have, it is the business of impartial criticism to discover. As in displaying the excellence of Milton I have not made long quotations, because of

selecting beauties there had been no end, I shall in the same general manner mention that which seems to deserve censure; for what Englishman can take delight in transcribing passages, which, if they lessen the reputation of Milton, diminish in some degree the honour of our country!

"The plan of " Paradise Lost" has this inconvenience, that it comprises neither human actions, nor human manners. The man and woman, who act and suffer, are in a state which no other man or woman can ever know. The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged; beholds no condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself; he has, therefore, little natural curiosity or sympathy.

In the Poem itself there is a full display of the united force of study and genius; of a great accumulation of materials with judgment to digest, and fancy to combine them: Milton was able to select from nature, or from story, from ancient fable, or from modern science, whatever could illustrate or adorn his thoughts. An accumulation of knowledge impregnated his mind, fermented by study, and sublimed by imagination.

"It has been therefore said, without an indecent hyperbole, by one of his encomiasts, that in reading "Paradise Lost we read a book of universal knowledge.

"But original deficience cannot be supplied. The want of human interest is always felt." Paradise Lost" is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again.

Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction, retire harrassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions.

Another inconvenience of Milton's design is, that it requires the description of what cannot be described, the agency of spirits, and proves, in a variety of instances, that the confusion of spirit and matter which pervades the whole narration of the war of heaven fills it with incongruity.

"Milton's allegory of Sin and Death is undoubtedly faulty. Sin is indeed the mother of Death, and may be allowed to be the portress of hell; but when they stop the journey of Satan, a journey described as real, and when Death offers him battle, the allegory is broken. That Sin and Death should have shewn the way to hell might have been allowed; but they cannot facilitate the passage by building a bridge, because the difficulty of Satan's passage is described as real and sensible, and the bridge ought to be only figurative. The ⚫ hell assigned to the rebellious spirits is described as not less local than the residence of man. It is

placed in some distant part of space separated from the regions of harmony and order by a chaotic waste and an unoccupied vacuity; but Sin and Death worked up a mole of aggregated soil, cemented with asphaltus, á work too bulky for ideal architects.

"This unskilful Allegory appears to me one of the greatest faults of the poem; and to this there was no temptation but the author's opinion of its beauty."

After pointing out some objections to the conduct of the narrative, the critic closes his examination of" Paradise Lost" in these words:

"Such are the faults of that wonderful performance" Paradise Lost," which he who can put in balance with its beauties must be considered not as nice but as dull, as less to be censured for want of candour than pitied for want of sensibility.

Of "Paradise Regained, and "Samson Agonistes”—the first has been too much depreciated, the latter too much admired.

"The highest praise of genius is original invention. Milton cannot be said to have contrived the structure of an epic poem, and therefore must yield to that vigour and amplitude of mind to which all generations must be indebted for the art of poetical narration, for the texture of the fable, the variation of incident, the interposition of dialogue, and all the stratagems that surprise and enchain attention. But of all the borrowers from Homer, Milton is perhaps the least indebted. He was naturally a thinker for himself, confident of his own abilities, and disdainful of help or hindrance: he did not refuse admission to the thoughts or images of his predecessors, but he did not seek them. From his contemporaries he neither courted nor received support; there is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors might be gratified, or favours gained; no exchange of praise, nor solicitation of support. His great works were performed under discountenance, and in