There is indeed one leading passage in Johnson's criticism, of which no traces can be found in Addison:-and behold what it is!" Original deficience cannot be supplied: the want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost' is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure. We read Milton for instruction; retire harassed and overburdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master, and seek for companions!" Such was Johnson's taste; such his sensibility; such the character of his intellect! Yet this is he whose censorious and heartless judgment is to blast the fame of poets of less strength than Milton, yet of great merits, like Gray and Collins!-who is to set up Blackmore and Watts; and exalt Dryden and Pope above all other men of poetical genius! Having thus closely examined this celebrated critique of the biographer, I find that it sinks to nothing; and as almost all his pretensions to critical judgment in the higher branches of poetry have been founded on it, the ground ought surely to be taken from under him. In his discrimination of the respective merits of Dryden and Pope he is more at home, and therefore more to be depended on. As to Addison's Essay, it ought to be studied and almost got by heart by every culti vated mind which understands the English language. It is in all respects a masterly performance; just in thought, full of taste and the finest sensibility, eloquent and beautiful in composition, widely learned, and so clearly explanatory of the true principles of poetry, that whoever is master of them, cannot mistake in his decision of poetical merit. It puts Milton above all other poets, on such tests as cannot be resisted. One thing, however, must be observed, that neither Addison nor Johnson seem much acquainted with Italian poetry. It cannot be unacceptable to put before the reader a few extracts from Addison :"Homer and Virgil introduced persons whose characters are commonly known among men, and such as are to be met with either in history, or in ordinary conversation: Milton's characters, most of them, lie out of nature, and were to be formed purely by his own invention. It shows a greater genius in Shakspeare to have drawn his Caliban, than his Hotspur, or Julius Cæsar: the one was to be supplied out of his own imagination, whereas the other might have been formed upon tradition, history, and observation. It was much easier, therefore, for Homer to find proper sentiments for an assembly of Grecian generals, than for Milton to diversify his infernal council with proper characters, and inspire them with a variety of sentiments. The loves of Dido and Æneas are only copies of what has passed between other persons. Adam and Eve before the Fall are a different species from that of mankind, who are descended from them; and none but a poet of the most unbounded invention and the most exquisite judgment, could have filled their conversation and behaviour with so many apt circum stances during their state of innocence. "Nor is it sufficient for an epic poem to be filled with such thoughts as are natura., unless it abound also with such as are sublime. Milton's chief talent, and indeed his distinguishing excellence, lies in the sublimity of his thoughts. There are others of the moderns, who rival him in every other part of poetry; but in the greatness of his sentiments, he triumphs over all the poets both modern and ancient, Homer only excepted. It is impossible for the imagination of man to distend itself with greater ideas, than those which he has laid together in his first, second, and sixth books. The seventh, which describes the creation of the world, is likewise wonderfully sublime, though not so apt to stir up emotion in the mind of the reader, nor consequently so perfect in the epic way of writing, because it is filled with less action. Let the judicious reader compare what Longinus has observed on several passages in Homer, and he will find parallels for most of them in the Paradise Lost."" Again, in another place-" Aristotle observes, that the fable of an epic poem should abound in circumstances that are both credible and astonishing; or, as the French critic chooses to phrase it, the fable should be filled with the probable and the marvellous. This rule is as fine and, just as any in Aristotle's whole Art of Poetry. "If the fable is only probable, it differs nothing from a true history; if it is only marvellous, it is no better than a romance: the great secret, therefore, of heroic poetry is to relate such circumstances as may produce in the reader at the same time both belief and astonishment. This is brought to pass in a well-chosen fable, by the account of such things as have really happened according to the received opinions of mankind. Milton's fable is a master-piece of this nature; as the War in Heaven, the Condition of the Fallen Angels, the State of Innocence, the Temptation of the Serpent, and the Fall of Man, though they are very astonishing in themselves, are not only credible, but actual points of faith. "Again, when Satan is within prospect of Eden, and looking round upon the glories of the creation, he is filled with sentiments different from those which he discovered whilst he was in hell. The place inspires him with thoughts more adapted to it: he reflects upon the happy condition from whence he fell, and breaks forth into a speech that is softened with several transient touches of remorse and self-accusation: but at length he confirms himself in impenitence, and in his design of drawing man into his own state of guilt and misery. This conflict of passions is raised with a great deal of art, as the opening of his speech to the Sun is very bold and noble. The speech is, I think, the finest that is ascribed to Satan in the whole poem. The evil spirit afterwards proceeds to make his discoveries concerning our first parents, and to learn after what manner they may be best attacked. His bounding over the walls of Paradise; his sitting in the shape of a cormorant upon the tree of life, which stood in the centre of it, and overtopped all the other trees of the garden; his alighting among the herd of animals, which are so beautifully represented as playing about Adam and Eve, together with his transforming himself into different shapes, in order to hear their conversations, are circumstances that give an agreeable surprise to the reader, and are devised with great art, to connect that series of adventures in which the poet has engaged this great artificer of fraud. "The thought of Satan's transformation into a cormorant, and placing himself on the Tree of Life, seems raised up on that passage in the Iliad, where two deities are described as perching at the top of an oak in the shape of vultures. His planting himself at the car of Eve under the form of a toad, in order to produce vain dreams and imaginations, is a circumstance of the same nature, as his starting up in his own form is wonderfully fine, both in the literal description, and in the moral which is concealed under it. His answer upon his being discovered, and demanded to give an account of himself, is conformable to the pride and intrepidity of his character." L CHAPTER XXI. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. "THE description of Adam and Eve" (continues Addison in his admirable Essay), "in the fourth book, as they first appeared to Satan, is exquisitely drawn, and sufficient to make the fallen angel gaze upon them with all that astonishment, and those emotions of envy, in which he is represented. "There is a fine spirit of poetry in the lines which follow; wherein they are described as sitting on a bed of flowers, by the side of a fountain, amidst a mixed assembly of animals. The speeches of these first two lovers flow equally from passion and sincerity: the professions they make to one another are full of warmth; but at the same time founded on truth: in a word, they are the gallantries of Paradise. The part of Eve's speech, in which she gives an account of herself upon her first creation, and the manner in which she was brought to Adam, is, I think, as beautiful a passage as any in Milton, or perhaps in any other poet whatsoever. These passages are all worked off with so much art, that they are capable of pleasing the most delicate reader, without offending the most severe : That day I oft remember, when from sleep, &c. A poet of less judgment and invention than this great author would have found it very difficult to have filled these tender parts of the poem with sentiments proper for a state of innocence; to have described the warmth of love, and the professions of it, without artifice or hyperbole; to have made the man speak the most endearing things, without 1 descending from his natural dignity, and the woman receiving them without departing from the modesty of her character; in a word, to adjust the prerogative of wisdom and beauty, and make each appear to the other in its proper force and loveliness. This mutual subordination of the two sexes is wonderfully kept up in the whole poem, as particularly on the speech of Eve, I have before mentioned, and upon the conclusion of it; when the poet adds that the devil turned aside with envy at the sight of so much happiness, v. 492, &c." Of all the difficulties Milton had to overcome, the greatest seems to me to have been the description of the battle of the angels in the sixth book; because he was necessitated to resort to material agency. It is founded on Rev. xii. 7, 8-"There was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought, and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven." Bishop Newton says, "within the compass of this one book we have all the variety of battles that can well be conceived. We have a single combat and a general engagement: the first day's fight is with darts and swords, in imitation of the ancients: the second day's fight is with artillery, in imitation of the moderns; but the images in both are raised proportionably to the superior nature of the beings here described: and when the poet has briefly comprised all that has any foundation in fact and reality, he has recourse to the fiction of the poets in their descriptions of the giants' war with the gods. And, When war hath thus perform'd what war can do, he rises still higher, and the Son of God is sent forth, in the majesty of the Almighty Father, agreeably to Scripture; so much doth the sublimity of Holy Writ transcend all that is true, and all that is feigned, in description." In the following passages, Addison rises to a sublimity, which assuredly has never, in any criticism, been surpassed:-"It required great pregnancy of invention, and strength of imagination, to fill this battle with such circumstances as should raise and astonish the mind of the reader; and at the same time, an exactness of judgment to avoid everything that might appear light or trivial. Those who look into Homer, are surprised to find his battles still rising one above another, and improving in horror to the end of the Iliad. Milton's fight of angels is wrought up with the same beauty: it is ushered in with such signs of wrath as are suitable to Omnipotence incensed. The first engagement is carried on under a cope of fire, occasioned by the flights of innumerable burning darts and arrows which are discharged from either host. The second onset is still more terrible, as it is filled with those artificial thunders which seem to make the victory doubtful, and produce a kind of consternation even in the good angels. This is followed by the tearing up of mountains and promontories; till in the last place, Messiah comes forth in the fulness of majesty and terror. The pomp of his appearance, amidst the roarings of his thunders, the flashings of his lightnings, and the noise of his chariot wheels, is described with the utmost flights of human imagination. "There is nothing on the first and last day's engagement which does not appear natural, and agreeable enough to the ideas most readers would conceive of a fight between two armies of angels. "The second day's engagement is apt to startle an imagination which has not been raised and qualified for such a description by the reading of the ancient poets, and of Homer in particular. It was certainly a very bold thought in our author to ascribe the first use of artillery to the rebel angels: but as such a pernicious invention may be well supposed to have proceeded from such authors, so it entered very properly into the thoughts of that being, who is all along described as aspiring to the majesty of his Maker. Such engines were the only instruments he could have made use of to imitate those thunders that, in all poetry, both sacred and profane, are represented as the arms of the Almighty. The tearing up of hills was not altogether so daring a thought as the former: we are in some measure prepared for such an incident by the description of the giants' war, which we meet with in many of the ancient poets. What still made this circumstance the more proper for the poet's use, is the opinion of many learned men, that the fable of the giants' war, which makes so great a noise in antiquity, and gave birth to the sublimest description in Hesiod's works, was an allegory founded upon this very tradition of a fight between the good and bad angels. "Milton has taken everything that is sublime from the Latin and Greek poets in the giants' wars, and composes out of them the following great image: From their foundations loosening to and fro, : "Milton has likewise raised his description in this book with many images taken out of the poetical parts of Scripture. The Messiah's chariot is formed upon a vision of Ezekiel, who, as Grotius observes, has very much in him of Homer's spirit in the poetical parts of his prophecy. The lines, in that glorious commission which is given the Messiah, to extirpate the host of rebel angels, are drawn from a sublime passage in the Psalms. The reader will easily discover many other strokes of the same nature. "As Homer has introduced into his battle of the gods everything that is great and terrible in Nature, Milton has filled his fight of good and bad angels with all the like circumstances of horror. The shout of armies, the rattling of brazen chariots, the hurling of rocks and mountains, the earthquakes, the fire, the thunder, are all of them employed to lift up the reader's imagination, and give him a suitable idea of so great an action. With what art has the poet represented the whole body of the earth trembling even before it was created! ver. 218, &c. In how sublime and just a manner does he afterwards describe the orbed heaven shaking under the wheels of the Messiah's chariot, with that exception of the throne of God! Notwithstanding the Messiah appears clothed with so much terror and majesty, the poet has still found means to make his readers conceive an idea of him, beyond what he himself is able to describe, ver. 832, &c. In a word, Milton's genius, which was so great in itself, and so strengthened by all the helps of learning, appears in this book every way equal to his subject, which was the most sublime that could enter into the thoughts of a poet." Speaking of the eighth book, which describes the creation of Adam and Eve, Addison says, "These, and the like wonderful incidents in this part of the work, have in them all the beauties of novelty, at the same time that they have all the graces of nature: they are such as none but a great genius could have thought of; though, upon a perusal of them, they seem to rise of themselves from the subject of which he treats. In a word, though they are natural, they are not obvious; which is the true character of all fine writing."* In the tenth book, upon the arrival of Sin and Death into the works of the Creation, he observes," The following passage, ver. 641, &c., is formed upon that glorious image in Holy Writ, which compares the voice of an innumerable host of angels uttering hallelujahs to the voice of mighty thunderings, or of many waters." He continues :"Though the author, in the whole course of his poem, particularly in the book we are now examining, has infinite allusions to places of Scripture, I have only taken notice in my remarks of such as are of a poetical nature, and which are woven with great beauty into the body of this fable: of this kind is that passage in the present book, where, describing Sin as marching through the works of nature, he adds, Behind her Death Close following pace for pace, not mounted yet On his pale horse: which alludes to that passage in Scripture, so wonderfully poetical, and terrifying to the imagination :- And I looked, and beheld a pale horse, and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him: and power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with sickness, and with the beasts of the earth.' Addison concludes his series of eloquent, just, and admirable criticisms thus:"I have now finished my observations on a work which does an honour to the English nation. I have taken a general view of it under these four heads,-the fable, the characters, the sentiments, and the language: I have in the next place spoken of the censures which our author may incur under each of these heads; of which I might have enlarged the number if I had been disposed to dwell on so ungrateful a subject. * Johnson has borrowed this in speaking of Gray's Elegy. I believe, however, that the severest reader will not find any little fault in heroic poetry, which this author has fallen into, that does not come under one of these heads, among which I have distributed his several blemishes. "After having thus treated at large of Paradise Lost,' I could not think it sufficient to have celebrated this poem in the whole, without descending to particulars: I have therefore endeavoured not only to prove that the poem is beautiful in general, but to point out its particular beauties, and to determine wherein they consist. I have endeavoured to show how some passages are beautiful by being sublime; others by being soft; others by being natural; which of them are recommended by the passion; which by the moral; which by the sentiment; and which by the expression. I have likewise endeavoured to show how the genius of the poet shines by a happy invention, a distant allusion, or judicious imitation; how he had copied or improved Homer or Virgil, and raises his own imaginations by the use he has made of several poetical passages in Scripture. I might have inserted also several passages of Tasso which our author has imitated; but as I do not look upon Tasso to be a sufficient voucher, I would not perplex my reader with such quotations, as might do more honour to the Italian than the English poet. In short, I have endeavoured to particularize those innumerable kinds of beauty, which it would be tedious to recapitulate, but which are essential to poetry; and which may be met with in the works of this great author." I have here cited enough to draw again the attention of the modern reader to an elegant and exquisite author, whom the more recent fame of subsequent critics seems in some degreee to have pushed aside; but who is as superior to Johnson, as Milton is to Pope or Dryden. Addison was not vigorous in his metrical compositions; but he had a beautiful invention in prose. He was a classical scholar, of far finer taste than Johnson; and if not more profound as a moralist, more rich, more chaste, and, as it seems to me, more original. Johnson's critique on Milton is an instance how much he secretly borrowed. In his "Rambler" is a large proportion of verbiage: he has none of that nice, delicate, and sensitive discrimination which delights in Addison; those touches of the heart; those unforced and mellow observations; those flashes of polished and exquisite humour. He too often dictates as a pedagogue, and silences by his coarseness. It is not out of place thus to censure him in a "Life of Milton," whom he has traduced with as much bad taste in literature as malignity of temper. And what is the worth of the praise by which he has affected to counteract his scoffs and his cavils?—a disguised echo of the encomium of a predecessor, whose principles of poetry he was outraging by the whole tenor of his own judgments through the series of poetical biographies he was then composing. Examine the rules by which Addison has tried the details of execution in the successive books of "Paradise Lost:" will the praises or censures of Johnson on the poets whom he has criticised abide these tests? Johnson cared little for poetical invention, for imagery, or for sentiment: his whole idea of excellence lay in what he called ratiocination in verse: thus Dryden and Pope were his supreme favourites. I remember how he shocked the taste and the creed of the higher and more imaginative classes of his poetical readers, when his "Lives" came out: but he was the fashion of the day; and the attempt was vain to stem the tide. The sensitive were stunned by his coarseness; and the worldlings and the talkers became insolent in their triumph. An epigrammatic point, an observation on life, a stinging couplet, can be felt and repeated by every pert disputant in society: but cite a noble passage from a great poet, and it draws sneers or ridicule ! Johnson's work did great injury to the national taste; and debases it even to this day. Imagination, repressed in its proper issues, has broken out in wrong places: has become fantastic and distorted; in seeking not to be obvious, it has become unnatural. In the search for novelty we ought not to feign impossibilities or improbabilities: nothing should be extravagant; nothing over-coloured. We are to imagine what may be; but which is at the same time grand, beautiful, or pathetic. We are to take advantage of the dim hints of remote history, to fill up the details with the marvellous, the sublime, and the fair. Poetry deals more with the imagination than the understanding; but it must not outrage the understanding. Some contend that Johnson had imagination: if he had, it was the imagination of |