"hanging in a golden chain, This pendent World, in bigness as a star Of smallest magnitude close by the moon." Yet in Paradise itself we find the natural world of "lawns, or level downs, and flocks Grazing the tender herb;" of "Flowers of all hue, and without thorn the rose;" of vernal airs and trembling leaves and murmuring waters; of all kinds of living creatures, and in their midst "Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall, God-like erect, with native honor clad, (IV. 288-290.) It will be seen by what means Milton has made an impressive and to many even fascinating poem out of material which, as Dr. Johnson says, is wholly wanting in human interest. He brought to it an imagination equal to the utmost scope of his celestial machinery, so that immeasurable spaces and illimitable æons are in his hands as bricks and mortar in the hands of a builder. He ransacks the forests of Norway, the mines of India, the magnificence of Babylon, for images and comparisons. He tirelessly searches both history and fable and brings spoil of heroic deeds and sounding names from classic and Biblical lore. He measures his syllables, his inverted phrases, his involved sentences, with the ear of one to whom the rarest music is native, and his blank verse marches in bars and slips into cadences that ask no help of rhyme. Yet through all the mazes of music and imagery, such as might well bewilder a less consecrated poet, he keeps before him the stern purpose of his poem, to "justify the ways of God to man." We follow the story to the end, witness the fall of our First Parents from their happy state, hear their half-vain repentance, listen to the doom of mortality and expulsion from Paradise, and attend in not uncomforted sorrow as the Archangel Michael and the flaming sword lead them without the eastern gate, where "They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, (XII. 648, 649.) As beauty is the dominant quality of Milton's early poetry sublimity is the dominant quality here. It is seen in the spaciousness of the setting, the vastness of the more than planetary abysses that are unfolded, where height and depth and every other creature known to the soaring imagination dwell. It is seen in the imaginative sweep of history and legend. It is felt in the very harmonies of the verse, wherein diphthong and liquid conspire to make music even of otherwise superfluous proper names. But more than all else it is felt in the exalted tone of the poem, the "high seriousness," which, says Matthew Arnold, was beyond the reach of Chaucer, but was given to poets like Homer and Shakespeare, Dante and Milton. In pure moral loftiness indeed, we must account Dante and Milton supreme, the one the poet of medieval Europe, the other of Puritan England. After the death of Cromwell the Protectorate failed to afford a stable government and was followed in 1660 by the restoration of the Stuarts in the person of Charles II. The history of the succeeding thirty or forty years was in many respects a repetition of what had gone before. The Stuart rule meant tyranny, and also a wavering between the Protestant and Catholic forms of worship, with a leaning toward the latter that bred discontent in the strong Protestant element. When the second James followed the second Charles, the discontent came to a head. James's reign was short. The Revolution of 1688 set William of Orange and Mary (the daughter of James) on the throne, and England, which had already formed a Triple Alliance with The Netherlands and Sweden, now joined in the Great Alliance of the Protestant powers of Europe against France. At the same time the Declaration of Rights accepted by William, guaranteed once more the powers of Parliament and the liberties of the people. Charles II. was himself a good-humored king, whose despotic traits scarcely showed themselves through the early part of his twenty-five years' reign. Brave, gay, witty, and indolent, he was devoted almost wholly to his personal pleasure, bringing with him from the continent, where he had mostly lived since the fall of his father, the dissolute manners of the French court. But however popular he may have been with certain courtiers, his selfishness could mean no good to the people. The essential want of harmony between king and subjects, which resulted in more or less treasonable plots, with the outward calamities-the Great Plague which in 1665 swept away a third of the population of London, the Great Fire of the following year, and disasters on the sea-combined to make this a sad period for England. It was in Charles II.'s reign that the name Tory was first applied to the court party-the old Cavaliers, or Royalists; and Whig to the country party-the Roundheads, or Puritans. Samuel Samuel Literary history would not have a great deal to record of the earlier years of the Restoration, had not Milton, in the obscurity of his retirement, composed the great poem we have already described-a poem which this age, if it may be said to have produced it 1612-1680. at all, produced only to its own contrasted disPepys, honor. A few of the cavalier singers, the "Caro1633-1703. lines" of the first Charles, were alive and not quite tuneless. Samuel Butler, a Caroline of the second, lampooned the Parliamentary party and the Puritans in his long and immensely popular poem of Hudibras (1663-1678), which gave the language a new adjective, as it gave literature scores of epigrammatic short couplets which no satirist in the same kind has surpassed.* Samuel Pepys, a busy and observing clerk in the navy department, kept, during the first ten years * Example of the Hudibrastic couplet, or distich: "For those that fly may fight again, of the Restoration, a minute Diary in cipher, which was published in 1825, and which, by its interesting revelations, political and personal, raises the author to a position of historical and literary importance.* A little later, Sir William Temple attained eminence as a writer of polished essays; and John Locke published his great essay on The Human Understanding (1690), in which the theory is upheld that all knowledge is derived from experience, a theory quite in accord with Bacon's insistence upon the experimental method in science. Throughout the period there was a revived activity in the drama, but never, The Comic Dramatists. perhaps, has the rule of extremes in reaction been better exemplified than in the character of the stageplays which became popular after the twenty years' suppression of the theatres. The Restoration drama, as exhibited by the comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, and others, is synonymous with all that is impudently witty, irreverent, and licentious, and marks the lowest stage of morality, or immorality, which that kind of writing in English has reached. Some very good tragedy, however, was written by Otway and Dryden, and indeed Dryden is in every way the great redeeming figure of the age. He belongs, however, in his best work, to the latter part of it, and represents so fully the new spirit that before considering him we must take note of a prose writer in whom the lingering Puritan spirit was still represented, and who, as a matter of fact, has always been more widely read than any of the newer school, not excluding Dryden himself. John Bunyan was born at Elstow, near Bedford, some forty miles north of London, in the year 1628. He was thus twenty years younger than Milton, and his early manhood fell in the * Example of the matter and style of Pepys's Diary: "So I forced the watermen to land us on Redriffe side, and so walked together till Sir W. Warren and I parted near his house and thence I walked quite over the fields home by light of link, one of my watermen carrying it, and I reading by the light of it, it being a very fine, clear, dry night. So to Captain Cocke's, and there sat and talked, especially with his Counsellor, about his prize goods, that has done him good turn; here I supped and so home to bed. with great content that the plague is decreased to 152, the whole being but 330.' |