animals, not being able to think, could not feel; and Butler fastens upon their theory, incidentally, to enliven the course of his own narrative :

They now begun

To spur their living engines on:

For as whipped tops and bandied balls
The learned hold are animals;

So horses they affirm to be

Mere engines made by geometry.1

Of like character is the extremely humorous satire in The Elephant in the Moon, describing the observations of the Royal Society, made through a telescope, of the battles between the lunar peoples, the Privolvans and Subvolvans, the most surprising incident in which is the spectacle of an elephant breaking loose in the ranks of the contending armies. When the report of the learned is completed, it is discovered that the appearances explained in it have been really caused by the movements of swarms of flies and gnats, which, together with a mouse, have found their way into the tube of the telescope.

The recklessness with which Butler ridicules every theory of the physical order of the universe, whether founded on the deductive or inductive system of philosophy, is in fact merely a reflection of what I have already noticed in the poetry of Donne, the wide-spread Pyrrhonism of his time. Tossed to and fro on the waves of endless disputation about the foundations of faith and knowledge, reflective minds looked abroad on the society which seemed to be dissolving round them, with that feeling of solitude and melancholy which is characteristically expressed by Burton in his address, under the name of Democritus Junior, to the reader of his remarkable book:

Far from those wrangling law-suits, . . I laugh at all: a mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures, and how they act their parts, which methinks are diversely presented unto me as from a common theatre or scene. I hear new news every day and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, 1 Hudibras, Part I. c. ii. 53-58.

Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, etc., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies and sea-fights, peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms; a vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints of grievances are daily brought to our ears; new books every day, pamphlets, currentoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, etc. . . . Amidst the gallantry and misery of the world, jollity, pride, perplexity and cares, simplicity and villainy, subtlety, knavery, candour and integrity, mutually mixed and offering themselves, I rub on, privus privatus: as I have still lived, so I now continue, statu quo prius, left to a solitary life and mine own domestic discontents; saving that sometimes, ne quid mentiar, as Diogenes went into the city and Democritus to the haven, to see fashions, I did for my recreation now and then walk abroad, look into the world, and could not choose but make some little observation, non tam sagax observator ac simplex recitator, not as they did to scoff and laugh at all, but with a mixed passion :—

Bilem, sæpe jocum, vestri movere tumultus.

On a mind like Cowley's the effect of this Pyrrhonism was to draw him towards a literary retirement apart from the world. The more stirring spirit of Butler was better pleased to find diversion in political warfare, and to invent an aim for activity by using the metaphysical genius of the age as a satiric weapon against itself.

Hence, in estimating the place of these two men in English poetry, we have to apply somewhat complex principles of criticism. We must recognise, in the first place, that Pope and Johnson are justified in their axiom, that no poem can hope to secure an enduring position in the affections of mankind that does not possess in itself an element of universal interest, since, as Shakespeare says,

One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.

At the same time it is to be remembered that only a very few poems, and those not always of the highest kind, appeal at once, in all times and places, to the feelings of humanity as the ballad of Chevy Chase did

to the heart of Sir Philip Sidney. In works of the finest art an ode of Horace, a play of Shakespeare, a canto of Dante- the imagination of the reader has to penetrate through an envelope of individual and national character, created by changes of time, place, sentiment, faith, custom, language, before he finds himself in complete sympathy with the thought of the poet, which is the life and soul of the ideal creation.

This is true in a special sense of the poetry of Cowley and Butler. Both were above all things the poets of their age: they had their reward in the enthusiastic praise which their contemporaries bestowed upon their work; but, in the generations that have followed, their poetry has had to stand the trial of questions like that proposed by Pope: "Who now reads Cowley?" or by Johnson with regard to Hudibras: "What should make a book valued when its subject is no more?" I have attempted to estimate what there is of injustice in this critical procedure. I have shown that the hardy explorer, who dares to march beyond the deserts and ruins which Time has wrought in the literature of antiquity, will often be repaid for his labours by reaching a point at which he may still listen to what Pope calls "the language of the heart," and discover the "universal truth" which Johnson rightly declares to be the goal of poetry. If he perseveres to this extent, he will cherish a feeling of gratitude towards the poets whose genius has been mainly turned to reflecting the thought of their times. For as an ancient nation, which has preserved the continuity of its institutions, moves always farther away from the sources of its birth, each member of it feels to employ the imagery of Wordsworth in a secondary sense

Those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,

Are yet a fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing,

and longs to enlarge his own life by linking it with that of his fathers. In Cowley and Butler we hear

the last accents of the Middle Ages; the spirit of those ages has passed by evolution into the organism of modern society: all Englishmen may therefore, if they will, reanimate the forms abandoned by the ancestral spirit with the breath of their own historic sympathy: he will "read Cowley" with especial pleasure who has felt by experience how the individual, in a time of transition, inclines to seclude himself from society: he will "value" Hudibras who finds in its imagery not only a history of the civil warfare of the seventeenth century, but a mirror of the party rancours of our own generation.

CHAPTER XIII

JOHN MILTON

A SOMEWHAT false impression as to the character of Milton's genius is created by the well-known sonnet of Wordsworth, beginning, "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour." Applied to the poet as a member of civil society, the words, "Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart," raise the idea either of a contemplative philosopher resembling Dante in exile, or of an intellectual recluse like "the melancholy Cowley." But the author of the Defensio Populi Anglicani was to a far greater extent than Dante a political partisan; while, in the eagerness of his sympathy with all the active influences of his time, no English poet has less than Milton of the spirit which finds an utterance in the Essay on Solitude. Again, if Wordsworth's phrase be taken to apply to Milton in his poetical capacity, it is true indeed that the style of Paradise Lost finds its only rival for sublimity and originality in the Divina Commedia. But on the other hand, if the elements which compose that style be considered separately, Milton appears to be so largely indebted to predecessors and contemporaries, that he has been even exposed to the charge of plagiarism. As his mind was the centre upon which all the great imaginative movements in his age converged, so the mode of his expression embraced and harmonised the various experiments in poetical composition that other men had attempted separately. I shall endeavour in this chapter and the next to process by which this marvellous fusion

trace