it were preserved; it is another to understand what the form was in the hands of those who did practise it, and to see its importance in the past history of our literature. Spenser and the other pastoralists would have smiled in scorn at the notion that the pastoral should be an exhibition of real shepherd-life, of the thoughts and manners of real shepherds. With them the pastoral form was a device, just as metre and rhyme were devices, but in some respects of larger consequence,-for distancing themselves from the ordinary and prosaic, and enabling them to live and move mentally in a more poetic air. It was themselves, with all their experiences and acquired ideas and feelings, that they flung into an imaginary Arcadian world to be shepherds there, and, under the guise of that imaginary life, express their own real feelings, their most intimate experiences, and their thoughts about affairs, in monologue or dialogue. Defensible or not originally, desirable or not among ourselves, as we may think this artifice of pastoralism, this device for poets of an imaginary removal of themselves into an Arcadian land in order to think under Arcadian conditions, it is gross ignorance not to know' how largely it once prevailed, and what a wealth of old poetry we owe to it. From the youth of Spenser, himself the pastoralist-in-chief, on through the lives of the next generation, or from 1580 to 1640, much of the finest English poetry is in the pastoral form. During that period the word 'shepherd' was an accepted synonym in England for the word 'poet.' They all, the finest of them all, 'drove a-field' together, and 'battened their flocks' in verse, though they had no flocks to batten. Milton, an admirer of Spenser, and describable as the

truest of the Spenserians till he taught the world a higher than the Spenserian in the Miltonic, employed the pastoral form in his Lycidas, as he had employed it already, though less decidedly, in others of his poems. He threw the story of his acquaintance with Edward King and of the sad death of that youth by drowning, and all the train of thought about the state of England which that death suggested, into the form of a pastoral lament for that shepherd, conceived as spoken by himself as a surviving shepherd. And who would wish now that he had done otherwise? What would a simple narrative of the shipwreck, or a few stanzas of direct regret, have been in comparison with the poem we now read? It is better than any memorial bust with basreliefs, better than any memorial picture. It tells the facts with the minutest fidelity, but it gives them in the setting of one long mood of Milton's mind as he mused over them. And it is this setting that has made the facts immortal. If we now remember Edward King of Christ's College at all, or know that there was ever such a youth in the world, is it not owing to Milton's monody?" Of Johnson's criticism of the diction, the rhymes, and the numbers, Masson observes, "The ear of the eighteenth century, one can see, if this is to be taken as the opinion of Johnson's contemporaries, must have been vitiated in proportion to the degradation of its notion of poesy. For fastidious beauty of diction, and musical finish of versification, Lycidas is hardly rivalled. The art of the verse is a study in itself. The lines are mostly the common Iambics of five feet, but every now and then there is an exquisitely managed variation of a short line of three Iambi. Then the interlinking and

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intertwining of the rhymes, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in threes, or even fives, and at all varieties of intervals, from that of the contiguous couplet to that of an unobserved chime or stanza of some length, are positive perfection. Occasionally, too, in the poem there is a line that does not rhyme; and in every such case, though the rhyme is never missed by the reader's ear, in so much music is the line imbedded, yet a delicate artistic reason may be detected or fancied for its formal absence. The first line of all is one instance. We shall leave the reader to find out the others." Of the 'grosser fault" with which Johnson accuses Milton in introducing St. Peter, Masson remarks, "Lastly [of the three figures that pass in succession across the visionary stage], in still more mystic and awful guise, comes St. Peter, the guardian of that Church of Christ for the service of which King had been destined, the apostle to whom the Great Shepherd himself had given it in charge 'Feed my sheep.' Not out of place even his grave figure in this peculiar pastoral. For has he not lost one of his truest under-shepherds, lost him too at a time when such an under-shepherd could ill be spared, when false shepherds, hireling shepherds, knowing nothing of the real craft they professed, were more numerous than ever, and the flocks were perishing for lack of care, or by ravages of the stealthy wolf?" But it is neither unnatural nor uncharitable to believe that in his judgment of this poem Johnson's fairness has been largely warped by his theological bias. In Paradise Lost, it is true, forms of doctrine are put forward which ill accord with those held by his critic. But they are not put forward in a controversial spirit, they do not affect contemporary

events, they do not call in question the principles of church government and organization which Johnson held with so stern an obstinacy. In Lycidas, Laud and his party are held up to an execration which to Johnson must have seemed something like blasphemy; and had the celebrated vision of St. Peter been omitted, it may be fairly questioned whether the critic would have found scope for his indignation as to the want of true feeling which he objects against the poet. Indeed, the insincerity, or at all events the inconsistency, of his denunciations regarding the form of the poem may be seen in the fact, pointed out by Hallam,* that Johnson himself "had in an earlier part of his life selected the tenth eclogue of Virgil for peculiar praise; the tenth eclogue, which, beautiful as it is, belongs to the same class of pastoral and personal allegory, and requires the same sacrifice of reasoning criticism as the Lycidas itself. Our sympathy with the fate of Lycidas may not be much stronger than for the desertion of Gallus by his mistress; but many poems will yield an exquisite pleasure to the imagination that produce no emotion in the heart; or none at least except through associations independent of the subject."

Upon Comus, L'Allegro, and Il Penseroso, Johnson's criticisms are at once more favourable and more just; while if those upon Paradise Lost sometimes betray an incapacity to appraise Milton's diction and versification, they are on the whole worthy of their subject, and but little alloyed with political and religious prejudice. To the objections urged at some length against Milton's inconsistency in making his angels at one time material * Literary History, iii. 270, 1.

and at another immaterial, Hallam thus replies * : "Johnson thinks that Milton should have secured the consistency of this poem by keeping immateriality out of sight, and enticing his reader to drop it from his thoughts. But here the subject forbad him to preserve consistency, if indeed there be inconsistency in supposing a rapid assumption of form by spiritual beings. For though the instance that Johnson alleges of inconsistency in Satan's animating a toad was not necessary, yet his animation of the serpent was absolutely indispensable. And the same has been done by other poets, who do not scruple to suppose their gods, their fairies or devils, or their allegorical personages, inspiring thoughts, and even uniting themselves with the soul, as well as assuming all kinds of form, though their natural appearance is not always anthropomorphic. And, after all, Satan does not animate a real toad, but takes the shape of one. 'Squat like a toad close by the ear of Eve.' But he does enter a real serpent, so that the instance of Johnson is. ill chosen. If he had mentioned the serpent, every one would have seen that the identity of the animal serpent with Satan is part of the original account.”

One question, incidentally noticed by Johnson, the question whether Milton, in his Paradise Lost, owed much to ancient or contemporary writings, has of late years been brought prominently into discussion by the claim especially made in behalf of the Dutch Vondel. Earlier criticism had discovered, as it thought, plagiarism various in kind from various sources. Voltaire, in 1727, suggested that the scheme of the poem might have been Literary History, iv. 239, 40, f.n.