who, to be sure, was recommending a particular edition of the poem as a text-book-that, "as it exhibits a view of every thing great in the whole circle of Being, it would (besides greatly improving them [schoolboys] in their own language) wonderfully open the capacity, improve the judgment, elevate the ideas, refine the imagination, and, finally, infuse a just and noble relish for all that is beautiful and great in the Aeneid and Iliad."1 Two men, at least, seem to have shared this opinion. Edmund Burke, whose speeches abound with quotations from Milton, "always recommended the study of him to his son, and to all his younger friends, as exhibiting the highest possible range of mind in the English language."2 And Richard Baron wrote: "MILTON in particular ought to be read and studied by all our young Gentlemen as an Oracle. He was a great and noble Genius, perhaps the greatest that ever appeared among men. . . . His works are full of wisdom, a treasure of knowledge." 3 But, though a boy were brought up in ignorance of Milton, the defect would probably be remedied at the university; for, according to Robert Lloyd, 'Milton-madness' was an affectation Glean'd up from college education." Even at the beginning of the century at least three Oxford professors of poetry, Joseph Trapp, Thomas Warton, and Joseph Spence, were imitators of Milton; Gray and the younger Thomas Warton lived at the universities, and most of the poet's enthusiastic admirers were college men. The extent of their enthusiasm is shown in the volumes of verse written by members of universities in celebration of various public events. These sumptuous folios and quartos are thickly strewn with octosyllabics and blank verse derived from Milton's work, as well as with phrases taken from it; and one of the collecBarrow's Latin verses prefixed to the second edition of Paradise Lost, which were thus translated in the Gentleman's Magazine, xxx. 291 (cf. p. 21 above): Who reads Lost Paradise, the fall Of wretched man, what reads he less than all? Thomas Marriott says the same thing in his Female Conduct, 1759, p. 99 (noted by Good, p. 83); and in the preface to the prose paraphrase of the epic we read, "It comprehends almost every Thing within the Extent of human Knowledge." 1 1 James Buchanan, First Six Books of P. L., rendered into Grammatical Construction (Edin., 1773), 1-2. 2 Prior's Burke (5th ed., 1854), 30. * Preface to Eikonoklastes, 1756 (Good, p. 175). On Rhyme (written c.1760), in Poetical Works, 1774, ii. 112. tions contains as many as twenty pieces which employ the meter, style, and diction of Paradise Lost.1 3 It may be partly as a result of this early reading that Miltonic allusions rose so naturally to the lips even of "the general" in the eighteenth century. The word "monody," for instance, which is hardly more common to-day than it was before the appearance of Lycidas, was much used after 1740.2 The god Comus, too, became a recognized deity who existed quite apart from Milton's masque; a "busto" of him, erected in a buffet at Hammersmith, attracted considerable attention, and the "temple of Comus" formed one of the most prominent features of Vauxhall. In this same resort, furthermore, was a statue by the much-admired Roubillac which represented Milton "seated on a rock, in an attitude [of] listening to soft music,' as described by himself, in his Il Penseroso." As no place of amusement was more fashionable or popular than Vauxhall, this is as if a likeness of the poet were to face the board walk at Atlantic City. More private tributes are to be found in the facts that ten lines from Penseroso were inscribed in a room of the hermitage at Hagley Park, that there was "a beautiful Alcove called Il Penseroso" at the end of a garden walk in Surrey, and that Jane Porter and her sister were dubbed "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso." Yet the vogue of the poems was not due entirely to the reading of Milton; for Comus, with abridged text, additional songs and dances, and attractive new music, came to be one of the most persistently popular musical entertainments of the century. At the same time, Samson Agonistes, the octosyllabics, and the version of the Psalms were repeatedly sung in Handel's very popular oratorios; the Song on May Morning and the hymn of Adam and Eve were set to music and "performed"; Lycidas was presented as a "musical entertain 8 1 See Bibl. I, 1761 (Pietas Oxon.). Two of the other collections of 1761 and 1762 each contain twelve such pieces, and some eighteen or twenty more are listed in Bibliographies I and II under the years 1761, 1762, 1763. Thomas Warton the younger had a good deal to do with several of these volumes. J. Husbands's Miscellany, published at Oxford in 1731, contains ten poems that are significantly influenced by Paradise Lost and one by Penseroso. 2 See below, pp. 549-55, 680-81. 3 I have collected over twenty passages in which the god Comus is spoken of with apparently no thought of Milton. The latest is in Byron's English Bards, line 650. 4 Pearch's Collection (1783), i. 329; Austin Dobson's "Old Vauxhall," Eighteenth Century Vignettes (1st series, 1892), 241. Dobson, ib. 244. Joseph Heely, Letters on Hagley, etc. (1777), i. 193 (Good, p. 211). 7 Lond. Mag., xxxii. 554 (1763). 8 Cf. pp. 430-32 below. For the Song, with music by M. C. Festing, see Miscellany of Lyric Poems performed in the Academy of Music (1740), 61-2; the hymn, "set to musick" by J. E. Galliard, was published in 1728 and 1773. ment" in memory of the Duke of York;1 parts of Allegro and the Arcades were used as songs in Garrick's opera, The Fairies (1755); and Paradise Lost was arranged for an oratorio at least four times, once by the great Mrs. Delany for Handel and once as the basis of Haydn's Creation.2 Considerable interest was also aroused by Fuseli's "Milton Gallery," where paintings for an edition of the poet were exhibited during parts of two successive years (1799, 1800). But the most curious of these extra-literary evidences of a general interest in the poet is afforded by Philip de Loutherbourg's "Eidophusikon." This precursor of the "Johnstown Flood" and the moving pictures, which consisted of cardboard models skilfully illuminated by colored lights, enjoyed unusual popularity in the years 1781 and 1786 and was warmly commended even by Reynolds and Gainsborough. The culminating scene was "Satan arraying his Troops on the Banks of the Fiery Lake, with the Raising of Pandemonium, from Milton." 3 The vitality of the enthusiasm for Milton in the eighteenth century is indicated by the storms of protest which broke over the heads of any who dared attack him. Three books in particular roused the fury of the poet's "idolators." The first was the 1732 edition of Paradise Lost undertaken at the suggestion of Queen Caroline by the great classical scholar Richard Bentley, who pretended to believe that the blind poet's assistants, besides misunderstanding his dictation and admitting errors through carelessness, had deliberately introduced many changes into the text. "Slashing Bentley," as Pope termed him, accordingly substituted "a transpicuous gloom" for the famous "darkness visible," and bracketed as interpolations the line Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides and the one that follows it, as well as the superb passage which ends, When Charlemain with all his peerage fell By Fontarabbia. These last lines, which were termed "a heap of barbarous Words, without any Ornament or Poetical colouring," Bentley would have 1 Lycidas, a Musical Entertainment, the words altered from Milton [by William Jackson], 1767. 2 See Mrs. Delany's Autobiography and Correspondence, 1861, ii. 280 (letter to Mrs. Dewes, March 10, 1743/4). Mrs. Delany's arrangement and that of Richard Jago (Adam, 1784?) were never sung; but Benjamin Stillingfleet's, set to music by Handel's pupil and assistant J. C. Smith, was printed and twice performed in 1760. Haydn, as Mr. Alwin Thaler points out in his Milton in the Theatre (Univ. of North Carolina, Studies in Philology, xvii. 283-4), used a German rendering of a libretto made by a Mr. Lidley (or Liddell), which was later put back into English. Austin Dobson, At Prior Park, etc. (1912), 114-16, 280. omitted, because Milton "surely . . . had more Judgment in his old Age, than to clog and sully his Poem with such Romantic Trash." Changes like these and there are hundreds of them are to-day simply amusing, or amazing, instances of misapplied ingenuity, but on their first appearance they were regarded as a serious matter and called forth immediate protest. The magazines were filled with essays and verses, the booksellers' windows with pamphlets, satires, and learned refutations of the "sacrilege" to Milton's work. Bentley's name became synonymous with pedantic folly, and is embalmed as such in The Dunciad and in the critical essays and notes that accompany it. Sneers and execrations continued to be directed at his work throughout the century, but within fifteen years popular interest was diverted to a new wonder. This was the charge brought by the Rev. William Lauder that considerable parts of Paradise Lost were simply paraphrases of littleknown foreign poets. The accusation, first made in the Gentleman's Magazine for January, 1747, reached its fullest development in an Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns, published towards the close of 1749. If Bentley's emendations had called up a storm of protest, Lauder's writings roused a tempest. Inquiries, protests, denials, reviews, lampoons, and prophecies, in both prose and verse, were poured upon the bloody but unbowed head of Milton's detractor. In the main, however, the charges were not disproved until November, 1750, when the Bishop of Salisbury showed that the passages which Milton was accused of borrowing were not in the works referred to but had been taken by Lauder from William Hog's Latin translation of Paradise Lost (1690).1 The attention attracted by the forgery is indicated not only by the ten books or pamphlets written upon it, and by the articles, nearly forty in number, which a single magazine devoted to the subject, but by many humbler protests, such as "Verses intended to have been spoken at the Breaking-up of the Free Grammar school in Manchester, in . . . 1748, when Lauder's charge of Plagiarism upon Milton engaged the Public Attention." 2 Upon the detection of the fraud, Dr. Johnson, who had written the preface to Lauder's book, dictated a letter of confession and apology which he compelled the offender to publish over his own 1 Sir John Douglas, Milton vindicated from the Charge of Plagiarism (1751). Oddly enough, Lauder had himself, in his translation of Grotius's Eucharistia (1732), made some use of the verse and style of Paradise Lost. 2 John Byrom, Poems (Chetham Soc., 1894), i. 178-92. Byrom's loyalty to Milton is the more interesting because he was not an admirer of blank verse (see ib. 387-93, and, for his controversy with Roger Comberbach on the subject, 411-28). name; yet the readiness with which the Doctor believed charges which most persons doubted seems to indicate an antipathy to Milton that is unquestionably present in his life of the poet (1779). In this work, which is marred by gratuitous sneers, misrepresentation of motives, and a willingness to believe the worst things that had been said of its subject, Milton's character, political activities, and prose writings are treated with the intense partisanship of a bigoted Tory. The ire of the poet's admirers was immediately aflame, and the biographer received as rough treatment as he had given. Within a year of the appearance of the Life, Archdeacon Francis Blackburne twice published a lengthy arraignment of "the meanness . . . the virulent malignity" exhibited by "the grand exemplar of literary prostitution," in which he thus explained Johnson's reasons for writing the biography: "When the Doctor found, on some late occasions, that his crude abuse and malicious criticisms would not bring down Milton to the degree of contempt with the public which he had assigned him in the scale of prose-writers; he fell upon an expedient which has sometimes succeeded in particular exigencies. In one word, he determined to write his Life." These are harsh words for an archdeacon, and there are harsher in his book; but they are all less surprising than the exclamation of the sweetspirited recluse of Olney, "Oh! I could thresh his old jacket, till I made his pension jingle in his pocket."2 Nor was Cowper's wrath short-lived, for thirteen years later he refers to "that literary cossack's strictures" on his idol, and bursts out with, "Oh that Johnson! how does every page of his on the subject, ay, almost every paragraph, kindle my indignation!" 3 Indeed, anger at Johnson's biography flamed many a year after Cowper was no more. In 1818, almost four decades after the appearance of the offending work, another writer devoted an entire book to attacking it. This critic found the Doctor's "antipathy so marked, so virulent and unrelenting," his "enmity" so "inexorable," that it was "difficult to conjecture into what vehemence of angry reproach it might have hurried him had it not been bridled by his awe of the public.” 4 1 Remarks on Johnson's Life of Milton (1780), 131, 148, 22–3. The Remarks first appeared in Blackburne's Memoirs of Thomas Hollis (1780), 533*-84*. 2 Cowper's letter to William Unwin, Oct. 31, 1779; cf. also Jan. 17, 1782, and March 21, 1784. * To William Hayley, Oct. 13 and May 1, 1792; and cf. Nov. 22, 1793. In a letter to Walter Bagot, May 2, 1791 (cf. also March 18, 1791), Cowper promises a “future letter" in which "Johnson gets another slap or two." T. H. White, Review of Johnson's Criticism on Milton's Prose (1818), 29–30. |