This was done by choice, not by necessity. He be a bastard, and quite as surely a bastard may be might have omitted the But, and have satisfied the herd bovine and porcine. Just below are two others in which three syllables are included in the time of two. But for that damn'd magician, let him be girt, &c. V. 802. Harpies and hydras, or all the monstrous forms, &c. V.605. And again a son. In v. 732, "the unsought diamonds" are ill-placed; and we are told that Doctors Warburton and Newton called these four lines "exceeding childish." They are so, for all that. I wonder none of the fraternity had his fingers at liberty to count the syllables in v. 753. If you let slip time, like a neglected rose, &c. And crumble all thy sinews. Why, prithee, shepherd, I wish he had cast away the yet in v. 745. Landor. You have crept unsoiled from V. 615 Under the sooty flag of Acheron. V. 600. And you may add many dozens more of similar verses, if you think it worth your while to go back for them. In v. 610, I find "yet" redundant. I love thy courage yet, and bold emprise. Commentators and critics boggle sadly a little farther on But in another country, as he said, Bore a bright golden flower; but not in this soil. On which hear T. Warton. 66 'Milton, notwithstanding his singular skill in music, appears to have had a very bad ear." Warton was celebrated in his time for his great ability in raising a laugh in the common-room. He has here shown a capacity more extensive in that faculty. Two or three honest men have run to Milton's assistance, and have applied a remedy to his ear: they would help him to mend the verse. In fact, it is a bad one: he never wrote it so. The word but is useless in the second line, and comes with the worse grace after the But in the preceding. They who can discover faults in versification where there are Lone but of their own imagining, have failed to Lotice v. 666. Why are you | vext, lady, ↑ why do you | frown. Now, this in reality is inadmissible, being of a metre quite different from the rest. It is dactylie; and consequently, although the number of syllables is just, the number of feet is defective. But Milton, in reciting it, would bring it back to the order he had established. He would read it Why are you vêxt? And then in a faultering and falling accent, and in the tender trochee, Lady | why do you frown? There are some who in a few years can learn all the harmony of Milton; there are others who must go into another state of existence for this felicity. Southey. I am afraid I am about to check for a moment your enthusiasm, in bringing you To those budge doctors of the Stoic fur, whom Comus is holding in derision. Landor. Certainly it is odd enough to find him in such company. It is the first time either cynic or stoic ever put on fur, and it must be confessed it little becomes them. We are told that, v. 727, And live like Nature's bastards, not her sons, is taken from the Bible. Whencesoever it may be taken, the expression is faulty; for a son may Think what; and be advised; you are but young yet. Not only is yet an expletive, and makes the verse inharmonious, but the syllables young and yet coming together would of themselves be intolerable anywhere. What a magnificent passage! how little poetry in any language is comparable to this, which closes the lady's reply, Thou art not fit to hear thyself convinced. Vv.792-799. This is worthy of Shakspeare himself in his highest mood, and is unattained and unattainable by any other poet. What a transport of enthusiasm! what a burst of harmony! He who writes one sentence equal to this, will have reached a higher rank in poetry than any has done since this was written. Southey. I thought it would be difficult to confine you to censure, as we first proposed. The anger and wit of Comus effervesce into flatness, one dashed upon the other. Come, no more; This is mere moral babble, and direct He rolls out from the "cynic tub" to put on cap and gown. The laughter of Milton soon assumed a wry puritanical cast. Even while he had the molle he wanted the facetum, in all its parts and qualities. It is hard upon Milton, and harder still upon inferior poets, that every expression of his used by a predecessor should be noted as borrowed or stolen. Here in v. 822 Will bathe the drooping spirits in delight is traced to several, and might be traced to more. Chaucer, in whose songs it is more beautiful than elsewhere, writes, His harte bathed in a bath of blisse. Probably he took the idea from the bath of knights. You could never have seen Chaucer, nor the rest, when you wrote those verses at Rugby on Godiva: you drew them out of the Square Pool, and assimilated them to the tranquillity of prayer, such a tranquillity as is the effect of prayer on the boyish mind, when it has any effect at all. Landor. I have expunged many thoughts for their close resemblance to what others had written whose works I never saw until after. But all thinking men must think, all imaginative men must imagine, many things in common, although they differ. Some abhor what others embrace; but the thought strikes them equally. With some an idea is productive, with others it lies inert. I have resigned and abandoned many things because I unreasonably doubted my legiti mate claim to them, and many more because I believed I had enough substance in the house without them, and that the retention might raise a clamour in my court-yard. I do not look very sharply after the poachers on my property. One of your neighbours has broken down a shell in my grotto, and a town gentleman has lamed a rabbit in my warren: heartily welcome both. Do not shut your book, we have time left for the rest. strain than even the best of Dante's. The great poet is sometimes recumbent, but never languid; often unadorned, I wish I could honestly say not often inelegant. But what noble odes (for such we must consider them) are the eighth, the fifteenth, the sixteenth, the seventeenth, and above all the eighteenth. There is a mild and serene sublimity in the nineteenth. In the twentieth there is the festivity of Horace, with a due observance of his precept, applicable metaphorically, Simplici myrto nihil adlabores. Southey. Sabrina in person is now before us. Johnson talks absurdly, not on the long narration, for which he has reason, but in saying that "it is of no use, because it is false, and therefore unsuit- This is among the few English poems which are able to a good being." Warton answers this ob- quite classical, according to our notions, as the jection with great propriety. It may be added Greeks and Romans have impressed them. It is that things in themselves very false are very true pleasing to find Milton, in his later days, thus in poetry, and produce not only delight, but bene-disposed to cheerfulness and conviviality. There ficial moral effects. This is an instance. The are climates of the earth, it is said, in which a part before us is copied from Fletcher's Faithful warm season intervenes between autumn and Shepherdess. The Spirit, in his thanksgiving to winter. Such a season came to reanimate, not Sabrina for liberating the lady, is extremely warm the earth itself, but what was highest upon it. in good wishes. After the aspiration, he adds, May thy lofty head be crown'd And here and there, thy banks upon, A few of Milton's Sonnets are extremely bad: the rest are excellent. Among all Shakspeare's not a single one is very admirable, and few sink very low. They are hot and pothery: there is much condensation, little delicacy; like raspberryjam without cream, without crust, without bread, It would have been more reasonable to have to break its viscidity. But I would rather sit said, ness. And here and there some fine fat geese, down to one of them again, than to a string of such musty sausages as are exposed in our streets at the present dull season. Let us be reverent ; The conclusion is admirable, though it must but only where reverence is due, even in Milton be acknowledged that the piece is undramatic. and in Shakspeare. It is a privilege to be near Johnson makes an unanswerable objection to the enough to them to see their faults: never are we prologue: but he must have lost all the senses likely to abuse it. Those in high station, who that are affected by poetry when he calls the whole have the folly and the impudence to look down on drama tediously instructive. There is indeed here us, possess none such. Silks perish as the silkand there prolixity; yet refreshing springs burst worms have perished: kings as their carpets and out profusely in every part of the wordy wilder- canopies. There are objects too great for these We are now at the Sonnets. I know your animalcules of the palace to see well and wholly. dislike of this composition. Do you doubt that the most fatuous of the Landor. In English; not in Italian: but Mil-Georges, whichever it was, thought himself Newton has ennobled it in our tongue, and has trivialised it in that. He who is deficient in readiness of language, is half a fool in writing, and more than half in conversation. Ideas fix themselves about the tongue, and fall to the ground when they are in want of that support. Unhappily Italian poetry in the age of Milton was almost at its worst, and he imitated what he heard repeated or praised. It is better to say no more about it, or about his Psalms, when we come to them. Southey. Among his minor poems several are worthless. Landor. True; but if they had been lost, we should be glad to have recovered them. Cromwell would not allow Lely to omit or diminish a single wart upon his face; yet there were many and great ones. If you had found a treasure o gold and silver, and afterward in the same excavation an urn in which only brass coins were contained, would you reject them? You will find in his English Sonnets some of a much higher ton's superior? or that any minister, any peer of parliament, held the philosopher so high as the assayer of the mint? Was it not always in a grated hole, among bars and bullion, that they saw whatever they could see of his dignity? was it ever among the interminable worlds he brought down for men to contemplate? Yet Newton stood incalculably more exalted above the glorious multitude of stars and suns, than these ignorant and irreclaimable wretches above the multitude of the street. Let every man hold this faith, and it will teach him what is lawful and right in veneration; namely, that there are divine beings and immortal men on the one side, mortal men and brute beasts on the other. The two parties stand compact; each stands separate; the distance is wide; but there is nothing in the interval. Will you go on, after a minute or two, for I am inclined to silence? Southey. Next to the Sonnets come the Odes written much earlier. One stanza in that On the Morning of the Nativity, has been often admired. Grove and spring Would soon unbosom all their echoes mild! What think you of this stanza, the fourth? but Landor. But can anything be conceived more the preceding and the following are beautiful too. exquisite than Landor. I think it incomparably the noblest piece of lyric poetry in any modern language I am conversant with: and I regret that so much of the remainder throws up the bubbles and fetid mud of the Italian. In the thirteenth what a rhyme is harmony with symphony! In the eighteenth, Swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail. I wish you would unfold the folded tail for me: I do not like to meddle with it. Southey. Better to rest on the fourth stanza, and then regard fresh beauties in the preceding and the following. Beyond these, very far beyond, But why is are the nineteenth and twentieth. the priest pale-eyed? Landor. Who knows? I would not delay you with a remark on the modern spelling of what Milton wrote kist, and what some editors have turned into kiss'd; a word which could not exist in its contraction, and never did exist in speech, even uncontracted. Yet they make kiss'd rhyme with whist. Let me remark again, on the word unexpressive, 116, used before in Lycidas, v. 176, and defended by the authority of Shakspeare. As You Like It. Act III., 82.) The fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she. This is quite as wrong as resistless for irresis tile, and even more so. I suspect it was used by Shakspeare, who uses it only once, merely to turn into ridicule a fantastic euphuism of the day. Milton, in his youth, was fond of seizing on edd things wherever he found them. Southey. Curtain'd with cloudy red, And all about the courtly table Bright-harnest angels sit. . in order serviceable. They would be the less serviceable by being seated, and not the more so for being harnest. This totally withdraws us from regarding the strange superfetation just below. The Circumcision, v. 6. Now mourn; and if sad share with us to bear. Death of an Infant. It is never at a time when the feelings are most acute that the poet expresses such occasions, from witticisms and whimsies. them but sensibility and taste shrink alike, on Here are too many; but the two last stanzas are Here are six verses, four of them in Shakspeare, containing very beautiful. Look at the note. specimens of the orthography you recommend. Sweet Rose! fair flower, untimely pluckt, soon vaded, Pluckt in the bud and vaded in the spring, Bright orient pearle, alack too timely shaded! Fair creature! kil'd too soon by Death's sharp sting. Again, Sweete lovely Rose! ill pluckt before thy time, Fair worthy sonne, not conquered, but betraid. Southey. The spelling of Milton is not always to be copied, though it is better on the whole than any other writer's. He continues to write fift and sixt. In what manner would he write eighth? If he omitted the final h there would be irregularity and confusion. Beside, how would he continue? Would he say the tent for the tenth, and the thirtent, fourtent, &c. Landor. We have corrected and fixed a few inconsiderate and random spellings, but we have as frequently taken the wrong and rejected the right. No edition of Shakspeare can be valuable unless it strictly follows the first editors, who knew and observed his orthography. Southey. From thy prefixed seat didst post. St. 9, v. 59. We find the same expression more than once in Milton; surely one very unfit for grave subjects, in his time as in ours. Let us, sitting beneath the sun-dial, look at the poem On Time. Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours Whose speed is but the weary plummet's pace. Now, although the Hours may be the lazier for the lead about them, the plummet is the quicker for it. And glut thyself with what thy womb devours. It is incredible how many disgusting images Milton indulges in. Virgil. Landor. In his age, and a century earlier, it was called strength. The Graces are absent from The Passion. The five first verses of the sixth this chamber of Ilithyia. But the poet would stanza are good, and very acceptable after the have defended his position with the horse of letters where my tears have washt a wannish rite." The two last verses are guilty of such an offence as Cowley himself was never indicted for. The sixth stanza lies between two others full of putrid conceits, like a large pearl which has extansted its oyster. "Uterumque armato milite complent." Southey. Then long eternity shall greet our bliss meaning undivided; and he employs the same word in the same sense again in the Paradise | thusiastic; after invention, the greatest qualities Lost. How much more properly than as we are of all great poetry. now in the habit of using it, calling men and women, who never saw one another, individuals, and often employing it beyond the person: for instance, "a man's individual pleasure," although the pleasure is divided with another or with many. The last part, from "When everything," to the end, is magnificent. The word sincerely bears its Latin signification. The next is, At a Solemn Music. And I think you will agree with me that a sequence of rhymes never ran into such harmony as those at the conclusion, from "That we on earth." Landor. Excepting the commencement of Dryden's Religio Laici, where indeed the poetry is of a much inferior order: for the head of Dryden does not reach so high as to the loins of Milton. Southey. No, nor to the knees. We now come to the Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester. He has often much injured this beautiful metre by the prefix of a syllable which distorts every foot. The entire change in the Allegro, to welcome Euphrosyne, is admirably judicious. The flow in the poem before us is trochaic: he turns it into the iambic, which is exactly its opposite. The verses beginning The God that sits at marriage-feast, On the Forces of Conscience. Milton is among the least witty of mankind. He seldom attempts a witticism unless he is angry; and then he stifles it by clenching his fist. His unrhymed translation of Quis multâ gracilis, is beautiful for four lines only. Plain in thy neatness is almost an equivoke; neat in thy plainness of attire would be nearer the mark. Landor. Simplex munditiis does not mean that, nor plain in thy "ornaments," as Warton thinks; but, without any reference to ornaments, plain in attire. Mundus muliebris (and from mundus munditia) means the toilet; and always will mean it, as long as the world lasts. We now come upon the Psalms; so let us close the book. Southey. Willingly; for I am desirous of hearing you say a little more about the Latin poetry of Milton than you have said in your Dissertation. Landor. Johnson gives his opinion more freely than favourably. It is wonderful that a critic, so severe in his censures on the absurdities and extravagancies of Cowley, should prefer the very worst of them to the gracefulness and simplicity of Milton. His gracefulness he seldom loses; his simplicity he not always retains. But there is no Latin verse of Cowley worth preservation. Thomas are infinitely less beautiful than Ovid's. These, May indeed is an admirable imitator of Lucan; He at their invoking came, But with a scarce well-lighted flame, bear a faint resemblance to Fax quoque quam tenuit lacrimoso stridula fumo Here the conclusion is ludicrously low, No marchioness, but now a queen. In Vacation Exercise. Driving dumb silence from the portal door, What do you think of that? Landor. Why, I think it would have been as well if he had sat there still. In the 27th verse he uses the noun substantive suspect for suspicion; and why not? I have already given my reasons for its propriety. From 33 to 44 is again such a series of couplets as you will vainly look for in any other poet. Southey. "On the Ens." Nothing can be more ingenious. It was in such subjects that the royal James took delight. I know not what the Rivers have to do with the present, but they are very refreshing after coming out of the Schools. The Epitaph on Shakspeare is thought unworthy of Milton. I entertain a very different opinion of it, considering it was the first poem he ever published. Omit the two lines, Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thyself a live-long monument, so good a one, that if in Lucan you find little poetry, in May you find none. But his verses sound well upon the anvil. It is surprising that Milton, who professedly imitated Ovid, should so much more rarely have run into conceits than when he had no such leader. His early English poetry is full of them, and in the gravest the most. The best of his Latin poems is that addressed to Christina in the name of Cromwell: it is worthy of the classical and courtly Bembo. But in the second verse lucida stella violates the metre: stella serena would be more descriptive and applicable. It now occurs to me that he who edited the last Ainsworth's Dictionary, calls Cowley poetarum sæculi sui facile princeps, and totally omits all mention of Shakspeare in the obituary of illustrious men. Among these he has placed not only the most contemptible critics, who bore indeed some relation to learning, but even such people as lord Cornwallis and lord Thurlow. Egregious ass! above all other asses by a good ear's length! Ought a publication so negligent and injudicious to be admitted into our public schools, after the world has been enriched by the erudition of Facciolati and Furlani? Shall we open the book again, and go straight on. Southey. If you please. But as you insist on me saying most about the English, I expect at your hands a compensation in the Latin. Landor. I do not promise you a compensation but I will waste no time in obeying your wishes Severe and rigid as the character of Milton has been usually represented to us, it is impossible and the remainder is vigorous, direct, and en- to read his Elegies without admiration for hi warmth of friendship, and his eloquence in ex Semicaperque deus semideusque caper pressing it. His early love of Ovid, as a master is too much so. Elegy the sixth is addressed to in poetry, is enthusiastic. Non tune Ionio quidquam cessisset Homero, Nere is often used by the moderns for neque, very improperly. Although we hear much about the Metamorphoses and the Æneid being left incomplete, we may reasonably doubt whether the suthors could have much improved them. There is a deficiency of skill in the composition of both poems; but every part is elaborately worked out. Nothing in Latin can excell the beauty of Virgil's versification. Ovid's at one moment has the fluency, at another the discontinuance, of mere conversation. Sorrow, passionate, dignified, and deep, is never seen in the Metamorphoses as in the Eneid; nor in the Eneid is any eloquence so sustained, any spirit so heroic, as in the contest between Ajax and Ulysses. But Ovid frequently, in other places, wants that gravity and potency in which Virgil rarely fails: declamation is no substitute for it. Milton, in his Latin verses, often places words beginning with sc, st, sp, &c., before a dactyl, which is inadmissible. Ah! quoties dignæ stupui miracula forma No such difficult a matter as he appears to represent it: for Jupiter, to the very last, was much given to such reparations. This elegy, with many slight faults, has great facility and spirit of its own, and has caught more by running at the side of Ovid and Tibullus. In the second elegy, alipes is a dactyl; pes, simple or compound, is long. This poem is altogether unworthy of its author. The third is on the death of Launcelot Andrews, bishop of Winchester. It is florid, puerile, and altogether deficient in pathos. The conclusion is curious: Flebam turbatos Cepheleiâ pellice somnos ; Talia contingant somnia sæpe mihi. Ovid has expressed the same wish in the same words, but the aspiration was for somewhat very dissimilar to a bishop of Winchester. The fourth an epistle to Thomas Young, his preceptor, a man whose tenets were puritanical, but who encouraged in his scholar the love of poetry. Much of this piece is imitated from Ovid. There are several thoughts which might have been omitted, and several expressions which might have been improved. For instance: Namque eris ipse Dei radiante sub ægide tutus, Deodati. Mitto tibi sanam non pleno ventre salutem, I have often observed in modern Latinists of the Martial wrote bad first order, that they use indifferently forte and forsan or forsitan. Here is an example. Forte is, by accident, without the implication of a doubt; forsan always implies one. latin when he wrote "Si forsan." Runchenius himself writes questionably to D'Orville "sed forte res non est tanti." It surely would be better to have written fortasse. I should have less wondered to find forte in any modern Italian (excepting Bembo, who always writes with as much precision as Cicero or Cæsar), because ma forse, their idiom, would prompt sed forte. Naso Corallæis mala carmina misit ab agris. Untrue. He himself was discontented with them because they had lost their playfulness; but their only fault lies in their adulation. I doubt whether all the elegiac verses that have been written in the Latin language ever since, are worth the books of them he sent from Pontus. Deducting one couplet from Joannes Secundus, I would strike the bargain. Si modo saltem. The saltem is here redundant and contrary to Latinity. Southey. This elegy, I think, is equable and pleasing, without any great fault or great beauty. Landor. In the seventh he discloses the first Here are two verses effects of love on him. Ut mihi adhuc refugam quærebant lumina noctem We perceive at one moment the first indication of love and of blindness. Happy, had the blindness been as unreal as the love. Cupid is not exalted by a comparison with Paris and Hylas, thian. He writes, as many did, author for auctor : nor the frown of Apollo magnified by the Parvery improperly. In the sixtieth verse is again neve for nec; nor is it the last time. But here come beautiful verses: Deme meos tandem, verum nec deme, furores; I wish cur had been qui. Subjoined to this elegy are ten verses in which he regrets the time he had wasted in love. Probably it was on the day (for it could not have cost him more) on which he composed it. Southey. The series of these compositions exhibits little more than so many exercises in mythology. You have repeated to me all that is good in them, and in such a tone of enthusiasm as made me think better of them than I had ever thought before. The first of his epigrams, on Leonora Baroni, has little merit: the second, which relates to Tasso, has much. |