to expect that Milton's splendour of diction, his varied music and sonorous rhythm, should be gauged with fitting measurement. Yet his Life of Milton is one which we could ill spare. The narrative is vivid and striking, the tone is for the most part manly and straightforward, the reflections are frequently just and apposite. It is, moreover, the portrait of a very great and very good man drawn by one who also was great and good. It is a story of struggle, distress, and suffering told by one who himself bore through life a heavy burden of trouble with. scarcely less sublimity of patience and not less undaunted fortitude. Congeniality of trial and congeniality of endurance helped, we may well believe, to compel an admiration not too willingly bestowed; and if a fiercelyburning antagonism of principle often prompted to undue severity of judgment, a generous pride in the glory of his fellow-countryman bade concede such a tribute of reverence that in the author of Paradise Lost the friend of regicides seems forgotten, if not forgiven.

Of literary judgments in this Life, the remarks upon Lycidas are more specific than upon any other of Milton's works. They are also more illiberal, and more indicative of Johnson's inability for the higher criticism. With readers of mature taste they will go for little, or rather will provoke a smile of amused surprise. But upon the student not as yet capable of forming an independent and trustworthy opinion, they may have an effect which it seems advisable to anticipate by an examination based upon sounder canons of criticism than those followed by Johnson. As an antidote to the poison, Masson's analysis will be effectual. His positions are as follows: "(1) It is a sheer assumption that Milton offered the

poem as an utterance of passion, or intense personal grief. The intimacy and affection [between Milton and King] were considerable, but less perhaps than what bound Milton to other friends of his youth, of whom he has left no similar commemoration. They were certainly less than the intimacy and affection that bound him to one other friend of his youth, of whom he has left various commemorations. The bosom-friend of Milton's youth, his very friend of friends from his boyhood to the time of his Italian journey, was that Charles Diodati to whom are addressed two of his Latin Familiar Epistles, the First and Sixth of his Latin Elegies, and one Italian Sonnet, and whose death, as premature as King's, and but one year later, gave occasion to perhaps the most remarkable of all Milton's Latin poems, Epitaphium Damonis. Only the accident that these pieces to and about Diodati are in Latin and Italian has prevented the fact of Milton's paramount affection for that young halfItalian from being generally known, and has led to the idea that the unique friend of Milton's youth was Edward King of Christ's. The death of that young scholar, so melancholy in its mode, did indeed move Milton, as it must have moved many. Here was one fine young life cut short, recklessly cut short, when thousands of coarser lives were spared, and when England and the Church of England had need that the best only should be prolonged. The recollection of the face and voice of Edward King, and of hours spent in his society, would return at the news, and would mingle with the keen imagination of the last scene, when one meek praying figure was marked on the deck of the sinking ship, resigned amid the shrieks, the mad hurry,

and the gurgling waters. What more natural than that Milton should throw his feelings on the event, and the whole train of thought which it suggested, into artistic form in a memorial form? This is precisely what Lycidas is. It is the same kind of tribute from a poet to the memory of a friend as a bust, with pedestal and basreliefs, would have been from a sculptor, or some thoughtful picture, of a few figures placed in a fit landscape or sea-view, would have been from a painter. Personal feeling is present; but it blends with, and passes into, the feeling of the artist thinking of his subject. (2) Johnson's criticism would abolish, by implication, all poetry whatsoever. In that crude sense of what is 'natural' which his criticism begs, all poetry is unnatural. No poem, even of passion, can possibly be 'natural' in the sense of being a record of the exact mental procedure consentaneous with, or appropriate to, the immediate moment of the passion. If passion 'runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions,' if passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius,' neither does passion perform such simple acts of literary art as the construction of clear sentences, the formation of lines of metre, or the invention of rhymes. Grief, in its first act, in poets as in other people, consumes itself in 'Ohs' and 'Ahs,' in sobs and agitated gestures, in dull numbed musings, incoherent verbal bursts, pacings of the chamber through the weary night. To poets, however, as soon as there is a lull of comparative tranquillity, and aiding perhaps to bring on that lull, there comes the use of those artifices of expression which are with them hardly artifices any longer, but the very habits of their minds.

Then is produced the lay of the occasion, the song or longer poem, recording the grief indeed, and even renewing and deepening it, but weaving into the grief all the beauty of cognate story and meditation that it will bear. True, there will still be gradations of apparent closeness to the primary moment or remoteness from it, according either to the intensity of the original grief or to the poet's acquired habits of artistic working. Simplest of all, least removed of all from the original moment of feeling, and therefore most likely in some poets, and most natural in seeming to most readers, will be the direct lyric of sorrow in a few passionate stanzas. Burns's Highland Mary, and other songs of his, are examples. But there may be memorial poems, tributes to a recent or past personal grief, which shall be as true and natural, and yet be of more extensive design and more complex feature. These may contain trains of varied thought and phantasy which the original feeling has originated, and therefore may claim as its own; they may be speculative and occult, or figurative and mythological, as the habits of the poet's thinking may determine; even Mincius and Arethuse need not be absent, nor rough satyrs and fauns with clover heel. Witness Shelley's Adonais to the memory of Keats. Or witness Tennyson's In Memoriam. What is that chief of memorial poems in the English tongue but an aggregation of lyrics in which, though one deep and enduring personal feeling moved to them all and pervades them all, remote allusions and obscure opinions,' beyond the learning of Johnson's time, are plentifully interwoven, snatches of story occur and recur, and all the science and metaphysics of the time become relevant to one death?

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Now Milton's Lycidas is not, and does not profess to be, a poem of such personal sorrow, by many degrees, as In Memoriam. Nay, as Edward King was not a Keats, it is presumably less a poem of personal sorrow than Adonais. All the more are the traces of deliberate and conscious art which are visible in it to be regarded as consistent with the poet's actual kind and amount of feeling when he wrote it, and his true intention. There are such traces. Twice in the body of the poem, as we have seen, Milton restrains or checks himself, as having passed somewhat the strict bounds of the strain in which he had begun; and at the close there is an epilogue, in his own name, characterising the poem as a 'Doric lay,' in which the tender stops of various quills' had been touched, and also hinting that the artist is moving on to other themes, which will require a different treatment. (3) One established, and indeed prevalent, artifice in the poetry of Milton's day was the artifice of the pastoral form, and Johnson's criticism exhibits an utter obtuseness to the real nature, meaning, and power of this artifice. They never drove a-field and they had no flocks to batten!' No, nor did Theocritus or Virgil ever keep sheep, or pipe on oaten flutes beneath the beech-trees. Nor did the Portuguese pastoral poets do the like, nor Sannazaro and the Italians. Nor was

Spenser a real Colin Clout, with Sidney, and Raleigh, and Shakespeare, and all the other poets, or other eminent Englishmen of the day, surrounding him as actual shepherds, called Astrophel, and Cuddie, and Willie, and Thomalin! What then? We know what they meant. It is one thing to hold that the pastoral form might still suit our modern times, and to wish that