to set up his claim of originality against him. A more serious charge of this kind has been urged against the principal character in Paradise Lost (that of Satan), which is said to have been taken from Marino, an Italian poet. Of this, we may be able to form some judgment, by a comparison with Crashaw's translation of Marino's Sospetto d'Herode. The description of Satan alluded to, is given in the following stanzas : "Below the bottom of the great abyss, There where one centre reconciles all things, The judge of torments, and the king of tears, His eyes, the sullen dens of death and night, Such his fell glances as the fatal light His breath hell's lightning is; and each deep groan His flaming eyes' dire exhalation Unto a dreadful pile gives fiery breath; (His shop of flames) he fries himself, beneath This portrait of monkish superstition does not equal the grandeur of Milton's description. "His form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appear'd Milton has got rid of the horns and tail, the vulgar and physical insignia of the devil, and clothed him with other greater and intellectual terrors, reconciling beauty and sublimity, and converting the grotesque and deformed into the ideal and classical. Certainly Milton's mind rose superior to all others in this respect, on the outstretched wings of philosophic contemplation, in not confounding the depravity of the will with physical distortion, or supposing that the distinctions of good and evil were only to be sub jected to the gross ordeal of the senses. In the subsequent stanzas, we however find the traces of some of Milton's boldest imagery, though its effect is injured by the incongruous mixture above stated. "Struck with these great concurrences of things*, He shook himself, and spread his spacious wings, While thus heav'n's highest counsels, by the low Ran trembling through the hollow vaults of night." The poet adds "The while his twisted tail he knaw'd for spite." There is no keeping in this. This action of meanness and mere vulgar spite, common to the most contemptible creatures, takes away from * Alluding to the fulfilment of the prophecies and the birth of the Messiah. +"He spreads his sail-broad vans."-Par. Lost, b.ii. 1.927. the terror and power just ascribed to the prince of Hell, and implied in the nature of the consequences attributed to his every movement of mind or body. Satan's soliloquy to himself is more beautiful and more in character at the same time. "Art thou not Lucifer? he to whom the droves Of stars that gild the morn in charge were given? Ah! wretch! what boots it to cast back thine' This is true beauty and true sublimity: it is also true pathos and morality: for it interests the mind, and affects it powerfully with the idea of glory tarnished, and happiness forfeited with the loss of virtue: but from the horns and tail of the brute-demon, imagination cannot reascend to the Son of the morning, nor be dejected by the transition from weal to woe, which it cannot, without a violent effort, picture to itself. In our author's account of Cruelty, the chief minister of Satan, there is also a considerable approach to Milton's description of Death and Sin, the portress of hell-gates. "Thrice howl'd the caves of night, and thrice the sound, 'Mongst all the palaces in hell's command, On the whole, this poem, though Milton has undoubtedly availed himself of many ideas and passages in it, raises instead of lowering our conception of him, by shewing how much more he added to it than he has taken from it. Crashaw's translation of Strada's description of the Contention between a nightingale and a musician, is elaborate and spirited, but not equal to Ford's version of the same story in his Lover's Melancholy. One line may serve as a specimen of delicate quaintness, and of Crashaw's style in general. "And with a quavering coyness tastes the strings." * See Satan's reception on his return to Pandemonium, in book x. of Paradise Lost. |