freedom? And who now, at this distance of time, can listen to those bursts of enthusiasm, so frequent in his works, even though lisped by the lips of a child, without the most tumultuous emotions of mingled rapture and wonder.

All these things considered, it appears to be matter of astonishment, notwithstanding the causes we have enumerated,--that men should so generally have abstained from the perusal of works so palpably excellent. Yet Addison, who, in the Spectator, endeavoured to do justice to Paradise Lost,-—which had also, until then, experienced a considerable share of neglect,-took no pains to rescue the prose treatises from the same fate. But the causes that had at first thrown them into the shade were still in operation. And though, soon after the Revolution of 1688, Toland had meritoriously sought to bring them once more into notice, his success was extremely partial; for few or no references are made to any of them by the writers of what has been absurdly called the Augustan age of English literature.

In the year 1738, however, when the minister was supposed to be meditating some grievous restrictions on the press, Thompson the poet, an ardent lover of liberty, published an edition of the Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, with a spirited preface. Dr. Birch had, indeed, a few years earlier edited the whole of the prose works, first in folio, and, a second time, in quarto, with a laborious biography of the author prefixed. Gradually, from that period to the present, these trophies of the commonwealth have attracted, among the lovers of literature, more and more notice; and it should not be forgotten that among those who have done most service in this way are several clergymen of the Church of England.

Of Dr. Johnson, who, unfortunately for himself, is numbered among those that have written the Life of Milton, I must necessarily speak; but, though of all his adversaries, from the days of Salmasius and Dumoulin to the present, he may be regarded as the most mischievous and unjust, it is very far from being my desire to remember his hostility with bitterness: for he too, in spite of many failings, was a good man, and a distinguished writer. It is now, however, very generally acknowledged, that in undertaking a Life of Milton he ventured upon what he was unfit to execute; and if, at the same time, his libel were omitted in the Lives of the Poets, and condemned to the oblivion it deserves, the following remarks would be in some measure unnecessary. But so long as that production is reprinted, and circulated, every honest and impartial man, however favourably disposed in other respects towards Johnson, must, when Milton is his subject, do his best to defend him from its envenomed calumnies.

Dr. Johnson, no matter how, and perhaps both the cause and manner were unknown even to himself, had early imbibed principles favourable to arbitrary power; and, notwithstanding that he ac

cepted of a pension from a prince of the house of Hanover, is suspected of having been secretly a Jacobite. He was, besides, constitutionally averse from the sportive pranks of freedom, which by demanding the grounds of opinions in reality based upon a cloud, would have seriously ruffled his gravity. He loved to exercise, in his own person, a sort of dictatorship; and, with a consistency not often found in such petty despots, was willing the government should exercise the same despotic authority over him. In Milton, however, he discovered a man the most impatient of servitude; who had, moreover, contributed, in no small degree, to the downfall of the Stuarts, defended the tyrannicide of his countrymen, and overwhelmed with contempt all who thought as Johnson thought. It was, therefore, natural, and almost excusable, in the successful essayist and biographer, to aim at crushing the reputation of the old democratical puritan, by accusing him of plagiarism, domestic tyranny, laxity of morals, and insinuating, cautiously, a charge of irreligion.

The only motive which, had he well calculated, might have deterred him, would have been a consideration of the irreparable injury he must thus inflict on his own fame, by passing down to posterity as a wrong-headed sophist, insensible to the beauty of liberty and truth, destitute of sympathy for mankind at large, and sold, no matter for what reward, to the enemies and oppressors of the people. Such, at least, has been the result, such his punishment; and as Milton rises higher and higher towards the zenith, Johnson must set. They cannot dwell together in the same heaven of fame, or if they do, Johnson's star must" pale its ineffectual fire" in the neighbourhood of Milton's glory.

This, in many respects, no doubt, is to be regretted; but some good will spring from it, if it teach us, as the example of an execution teaches, to blame with less acrimony the illustrious dead. With respect to myself, no example is necessary to cause me to speak of Johnson with moderation, for I honour his memory, as I do that of every other good man; but honouring Milton's much more, as that of one every way greater and better, the reader, I trust, will pardon me the warmth I cannot but feel when dishonour and obloquy are attempted to be thrown, by what hand soever, upon his most venerable name. At first sight, Johnson's attack appears to be grave, and conducted without any remarkable outrage on public decency. It has little of the buffoonery, scurrility, and coarse invective with which Aristophanes attacks Socrates. He does not accuse the poet of filching a cloak, of measuring flea-leaps, of causing himself to be suspended in a basket between heaven and earth, to escape, while under the oestrum of meditation, the hebetating influence of the grosser atmosphere. His charges of impiety are less broadly insinuated, though introduced with inferior skill; but, in several points, no less likely in modern times to tell against the

accused, he excels the ancient libeller in adroitness. Knowing how pre-eminently loyal and attached to their kings the English are accounted, he substitutes, in his pleading, the word "regicide" for "tyrannicide; " represents the poet devoured by the most offensive vanity, which, he says, not only led him to entertain ridiculously lofty ideas of himself, but enviously and grudgingly to defraud other men of their just praise; affirms, that in his domestic government, he was a tyrant, a bad husband, a bad father, one who, with the means of doing better in his possession, gave his children a wretched penurious education; that, on returning from his travels, he most unpatriotically engaged in the instruction of youth; which Johnson, who had tried it himself, endeavours to confound with mechanical employments by calling it a “trade;” nay, more, that he pushed his republican habits so far as to adopt an abstemious system of diet, which to an elegant epicure and diner-out, like Johnson, must have appeared still worse than writing against the bishops. To crown all, to sum up his numerous delinquencies in one fearful word, he insinuates, but hesitates to assert positively, that Milton was POOR-that he suffered hunger; but that yet, in the midst of his indigence, his proud heathenish spirit looked with intolerable scorn upon tyrants and slaves, and dared to dream of eternal fame.

The fox which, in the fable, escaped from a trap with the loss of his nether bushy appendage, abhorred ever after all allusion to tails. So Johnson felt out of temper when the course of his narrative led him to speak of poverty. Nevertheless, he who, in writing to a bookseller, could subscribe himself the "Dinnerless," might have been expected to exhibit some sympathy for genius in distress. But this, perhaps, was weakness. The recollection of how frequently he had sat down hungry-not with Philosophy, for that he never knew, but with Criticism and Biography-was no doubt painful; and, falling on better days, he was tempted to despise the wisdom which, like his own erewhile, knew not how to provide itself with a dinner.

Another sore point with Johnson was, that Milton should be said to have rejected, after the Restoration, the place of Latin Secretary to Charles the Second. Few men heartily believe in the existence of virtue above their own reach. He knew what he would have done under similar circumstances; he knew that, had he lived during the period of the commonwealth, a similar offer from the "Regicides" would have met with no 66 sturdy refusal " from him; he knew it was in his eyes no sin to accept of a pension from one whom he considered an usurper: how, then, could he believe, what must have humiliated him in his own esteem, that the old blind republican, bending beneath the weight of years and indigence, still cherished heroic virtue in his soul, and spurned the offer of a tyrant! Oh, but he had filled the same office under Oliver Cromwell! Milton regarded "Old Noll" as a greater and better Sylla, to whom, in the motto to his work against the restoration of kingship, he compares

him, and evidently hoped to the last, what was always, perhaps, intended by the Protector, and understood between them, that, as soon as the troubles of the times should be properly appeased, he would establish the republic. In this hope Milton consented to serve with him, not to serve him; for Cromwell always professed to be the servant of the people. And, after all, there was some difference between Cromwell and Charles II. With the former, the author of Paradise Lost had something in common; they were both great men, they were both enemies to that remnant of feudal barbarism, which, supported by prejudice and ignorance, had for ages exerted so fatal an influence over the destinies of their country.

Minds of such an order-in some things, though not in all, resembling-might naturally enough co-operate: for they could respect each other. But with what sense of decorum, or reverence for his own character, remembering the glorious cause for which he had struggled, could Milton have reconciled to his conscience, taking office under the returned Stuart, to mingle daily with the crowd of atheists who blasphemed the Almighty, and with swinish vices debased his image in the polluted chambers of Whitehall! The poet regarded them with contemptuous abhorrence; and, if I am not exceedingly mistaken, described them under the names of devils, in the court of their patron and inspirer below. Besides, even had they possessed the few virtues compatible with servitude, it would have been matter of constant chagrin, of taunt and reviling on one side, and silent hatred on the other, to have brought together republican and slave in the same bureau, and to have compelled a democratic pen to mould court phrases for a despicable master.

So far, however, was the biographer from comprehending the character of the man whose life he undertook to write, that he seems to have thought it an imputation on him, and a circumstance for which it is necessary to pity his lot, that the dissolute nobles of the age seldom resorted to his humble dwelling! The sentiment is worthy of Salmasius. But was there then living a man who would not have been honoured by passing under the shadow of that roof?-by listening to the accents of those inspired lips?-by being greeted and remembered by him, whose slightest commendation was immortality? Elijah or Elisha, or Moses, or David, or Paul of Tarsus, would have sat down with Milton, and found in him a kindred spirit. But the slave of Lady Castlemaine, or the traitor Monk, or Rochester, or the husband of Miss Hyde, or that Lord Chesterfield who saw what Hamilton describes, and dared not with his sword revenge the insult, might, forsooth, have thought it a piece of condescension to be seen in the Delphic cavern of England, whence proceeded those sacred verses which, in literature, have raised her above all other nations, to the level of Greece itself!

In every point of view, however, Johnson was unhappy in his attempts at appreciating Milton. But he knew what would tell with

the vulgar; and, therefore, not caring for what inference might be drawn by the more judicious, boldly advanced what he desired to be believed, without giving himself the trouble to inquire whether it were true or not. To lessen the authority of a man's political opinions, it is impossible to conceive a surer way to succeed with the unreflecting than by creating the belief that he was a closet-philosopher, or statesman, who amused himself with making governments on paper, and, like another Jupiter, regulating, from his throne of clouds, the affairs of a world existing only in his imagination. This service is what Johnson undertakes to perform for Milton, who, in his eyes, was a poor recluse scholar, with little experience or knowledge of business. He might, indeed,-for this were difficult to deny,-construct an epic poem ; but immediately plunged beyond his depth when he sought to fathom the mysteries of state, which are only to be comprehended by persons, who, like himself and Boswell, had mingled with the great world, and discovered by what secret springs the machine of the commonwealth is kept moving.

When drawing up this part of his brief, Johnson must doubtless have lost sight, for a moment, of the circumstances of Milton's life. He must have overlooked that, after acquiring such knowledge as is attainable at an university, and by the most diligent private study, he had, at a ripe age, travelled through several foreign kingdoms, mixing freely with persons of all ranks, carefully noting whatever seemed worthy of remark, having rendered himself so far master of their languages as to be able, in most European countries, to express himself with the fluency of a native; that with the habits and manners of youth, his "trade" of teaching had made him acquainted; that his studies, as his adversaries found to their cost, had rendered him familiar with the transactions of past times; and that, if he really, after all, was ignorant in the science of politics, notwithstanding that he had, during fourteen or fifteen years, been deeply and actively engaged in public business, living among the ablest statesmen of the age, conversing daily with Cromwell, whom Dr. Johnson, perhaps, will allow to have been something of a politician—if after all this, I say, he was still a novice in state matters, his stupidity must have achieved a marvellous triumph over opportunity.

To such a conclusion, however, Dr. Johnson, expert as he is in sophistry, will, perhaps, find it difficult to bring us; and it remains to be comprehended by what logic he could himself have arrived at it there appear to be but the two ways following :-first, it may be supposed that the scales of prejudice lay so thick upon his eyes that he was incapable of discerning the truth; or, secondly, that discerning it well, he disingenuously wrote contrary to his convictions. Now, which way soever the question be decided, little lustre will thereby be added to the doctor's reputation.

On another subject, of a very different nature, the biographer appears to have been desirous of shaking the pillars of Milton's fame;