the case of any of the other great poets with whom he had to deal. A bigoted and extreme Tory, Johnson had to criticize the principles and political actions of one who held doctrines as extreme, if not as bigoted, in the opposite direction. A High Churchman of the most. unbending type, he was called upon to pass in review writings violently latitudinarian, schismatic, and, as the Treatise of Christian Doctrine shows, scarcely to be reconciled with any form of received religion. Think of the horror and loathing with which Johnson must have regarded The Demise of Kings and Magistrates, Eikonoklastes, Defence of the People of England, tractates in which kingly power is banned with curses of malignant fierceness, in which Charles, the beloved idol of Johnson's veneration, is insulted, harried, scourged, his divinity ridiculed, his execution sanctified, his downfall made the subject of a song of triumph! How should Johnson not shudder at the History of Reformation, the Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty, denunciations of everything sacerdotal that from his early boyhood had been cherished as reverend, holy, sealed with the seal of God's institution and upholding! To him the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, which even to many of Milton's fellow-thinkers was a stumbling-block, must have read as blasphemous arrogance; the Areopagitica, in whose trumpet tones liberty of thought and speech is proclaimed as an indefeasible right, probably sounded as a blast of revolutionary special-pleading and unbridled license of argument; while could he have read the longIost Treatise of Christian Doctrine, with its Pantheistic Materialism, its heresy as to the Decalogue, its justification of Polygamy, it would no doubt have been branded

as the ravings of lunacy, or the inspiration of Belial. "Fair is foul and foul is fair" might express Johnson's estimate of Milton's tenets, political and theological. The gods of the poet are the fiends of the critic. If, therefore, in the Life he could not even hope to be impartial, if here and again he lets fall an unworthy gibe, belittles Milton's aims and occupations, makes light of his sufferings and dangers, exaggerates his failings, questions the sincerity of his political faith, insinuates acts of baseness, colours as magnanimous clemency the mixture of policy and disdain which left the poet untouched amid the persecution and proscription which followed upon the Restoration; if the critic's appraisement of the poet is sometimes marred by a distorted estimate of the man, and a standard applied by which he would not have measured anyone else: we may yet admit that honesty of intention and a conscientious belief that he was serving the cause of truth were at the bottom of his severest strictures. Political and religious prejudice, however, was not the only difficulty in Johnson's path. Of Milton's cast of poetry, whether in its lighter or its more serious forms, the critic was by nature but poorly fitted to judge. With didactic, narrative, or satirical verse, he was at home. Where loftier flights were in question, his imagination failed to follow. His criticisms of the dramatic powers of Shakespeare, of the epic powers of Milton, are wholly inadequate; and from one who laid it down as an undeniable proposition that during the latter part of the seventeenth century and the earlier part of the eighteenth century, English poetry had been in a constant progress of improvement, we should be foolish

measurement.

to expect that Milton's splendour of diction, his varied music and sonorous rhythm, should be gauged with fitting 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.