against the principal character in 'Paradise Lost' (that of Satan), which is said to have been taken from Marino, an Italian poet. Of this we may be able to form some judgment, by a comparison with Crashaw's translation of Marino's 'Sospetto d'Herode.' The description of Satan alluded to is given in the following

stanzas :

"Below the bottom of the great abyss,

There where one centre reconciles all things,
The world's profound heart pants; there placed is
Mischief's old master; close about him clings
A curl'd knot of embracing snakes, that kiss
His correspondent cheeks; these loathsome strings
Hold the perverse prince in eternal ties
Fast bound, since first he forfeited the skies.

The judge of torments, and the king of tears,
He fills a burnish'd throne of quenchless fire;
And for his own fair robes of light, he wears
A gloomy mantle of dark flames; the tire
That crowns his hated head, on high appears;
Where seven tall horns (his empire's pride) aspire;
And, to make up hell's majesty, each horn
Seven crested hydras horribly adorn.

His eyes, the sullen dens of death and night,
Startle the dull air with a dismal red;

Such his fell glances as the fatal light

Of staring comets, that look kingdoms dead.
From his black nostrils and blue lips, in spite
Of hell's own stink, a worser stench is spread.
His breath hell's lightning is; and each deep groan
Disdains to think that heaven thunders alone.

His flaming eyes' dire exhalation

Unto a dreadful pile gives fiery breath;
Whose unconsum'd consumption preys upon
The never-dying life of a long death.

In this sad house of slow destruction

(His shop of flames) he fries himself beneath

A mass of woes; his teeth for torment gnash,

While his steel sides sound with his tail's strong lash."

This portrait of monkish superstition does not equal the grandeur of Milton's description:

treate

let

"His form had not yet lost

All her original brightness, nor appear'd

Less than archangel ruin'd and the excess
Of glory obscured."

Milton has got rid of the horns and tail, the vulgar and physical insignia of the devil, and clothed him with other greater and intellectual terrors, reconciling beauty and sublimity, and converting the grotesque and deformed into the ideal and classical. Certainty, Milton's mind rose superior to all others in this respect, on the outstretched wings of philosophic contemplation, in not confounding the depravity of the will with physical distortion, or supposing that the distinctions of good and evil were only to be subjected to the gross ordeal of the senses. In the subsequent stanzas, we however find the traces of some of Milton's boldest imagery, though its effect be injured by the incongruous mixture above stated.

"Struck with these great concurrences of things,*
Symptoms so deadly unto death and him:
Fain would he have forgot what fatal strings
Eternally bind each rebellious limb,

He shook himself, and spread his spacious wings,
Which like two bosom'd sailst embrace the dim
Air, with a dismal shade, but all in vain:
Of sturdy adamant is his strong chain.

While thus heav'n's counsels, by the low
Footsteps of their effects, he traced too well,
He tost his troubled eyes, embers that glow
Now with new rage, and wax too hot for hell.
With his foul claws he fenced his furrow'd brow,
And gave a ghastly shriek, whose horrid yell
Ran trembling through the hollow vaults of night."

The poet adds

"The while his twisted tail he gnaw'd for spite."

There is no keeping in this. This action of meanness and mere vulgar spite, common to the most contemptible creatures,

* Alluding to the fulfilment of the prophecies and the birth of the Messiah. "He spreads his sail-broad vans."-' Par. Lost,' b. ii., l. 927.

takes away from the terror and power just ascribed to the prince of Hell, and implied in the nature of the consequences attributed to his every movement of mind or body. Satan's soliloquy to himself is more beautiful and more in character at the same time:

"Art thou not Lucifer? he to whom the droves
Of stars that gild the morn in charge were given?
The nimblest of the lightning-winged loves?
The fairest and the first-born smile of heav'n?
Look in what pomp the mistress planet moves,
Reverently circled by the lesser seven:
Such and so rich the flames that from thine eyes
Opprest the common people of the skies?

Ah! wretch! what boots it to cast back thine eyes

Where dawning hope no beam of comfort shows?" &c.

This is true beauty and true sublimity: it is also true pathos and morality for it interests the mind, and affects it powerfully with the idea of glory tarnished, and happiness forfeited with the loss of virtue; but from the horns and tail of the brute-demon, imagination cannot re-ascend to the Son of the morning, nor be dejected by the transition from weal to woe, which it cannot without a violent effort picture to itself.

In our author's account of Cruelty, the chief minister of Satan, there is also a considerable approach to Milton's description of Death and Sin, the portress of hell-gates:

"Thrice howl'd the caves of night, and thrice the sound,

Thundering upon the banks of those black lakes,

Rung through the hollow vaults of hell profound:
At last her listening ears the noise o'ertakes,
She lifts her sooty lamps. and looking round,
A general hiss, from the whole tire of snakes
Rebounding through hell's inmost caverns came,
In answer to her formidable name.

'Mongst all the palaces in hell's command,
No one so merciless as this of hers,

The adamantine doors for ever stand

Impenetrable, both to prayers and tears.

* See Satan's reception on his return to Pandemonium, in book x. of 'Paradise Lost.'

The walls' inexorable steel, no hand

Of time, or teeth of hungry ruin fears."

On the whole, this poem, though Milton has undoubtedly availed himself of many ideas and passages in it, raises instead of lowering our conception of him, by showing how much more he added to it than he has taken from it.

Crashaw's translation of Strada's description of the contention between a nightingale and a musician, is elaborate and spirited, but not equal to Ford's version of the same story in his 'Lover's Melancholy.' One line may serve as a specimen of delicate quaintness, and of Crashaw's style in general:

"And with a quavering coyness tastes the strings."

Sir Philip Sidney is a writer for whom I cannot acquire a taste. As Mr. Burke said, "he could not love the French Republic" so I may say, that I cannot love The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia,' with all my good-will to it. It will not do for me, however, to imitate the summary petulance of the epigrammatist:

"The reason why I cannot tell,

But I don't like thee, Dr. Fell.”

I must give my reasons, "on compulsion," for not speaking well of a person like Sir Philip Sidney—

"The soldier's, scholar's, courtier's eye, tongue, sword,

The glass of fashion, and the mould of form;"

the splendour of whose personal accomplishments, and of whose wide-spread fame, was, in his life-time,

"Like a gate of steel,

Fronting the sun, that renders back

His figure and his heat"

a writer, too, who was universally read and enthusiastically admired for a century after his death, and who has been admired with scarce less enthusiastic, but with a more distant homage, for another century, after ceasing to be read.

We have lost the art of reading, or the privilege of writing, voluminously, since the days of Addison. Learning no longer weaves the interminable page with patient drudgery, nor ignorance pores over it with implicit faith. As authors multiply in number, books diminish in size; we cannot now, as formerly, swallow libraries whole in a single folio: solid quarto has given place to slender duodecimo, and the dingy letter-press contracts its dimensions, and retreats before the white, unsullied, faultless margin. Modern authorship is become a species of stenography: we contrive even to read by proxy. We skim the cream of prose without any trouble; we get at the quintessence of poetry without loss of time. The staple commodity, the coarse, heavy, dirty, unwieldy bullion of books, is driven out of the market of learning, and the intercourse of the literary world is carried on, and the credit of the great capitalists sustained by the flimsy circulating medium of magazines and reviews. Those who are chiefly concerned in catering for the taste of others, and serving up critical opinions in a compendious, elegant, and portable form, are not forgetful of themselves: they are not scrupulously solicitous, idly inquisitive, about the real merits, the bona fide contents of the works they are deputed to appraise and value, any more than the reading public who employ them. They look no farther for the contents of the work than the title-page, and pronounce a peremptory decision on its merits or defects by a glance at the name and party of the writer. This state of polite letters seems to admit of improvement in only one respect, which is to go a step farther, and write for the amusement and edification of the world, accounts of works that were never either written or read at all, and to cry up or abuse the authors by name, though they have no existence but in the critic's invention. This would save a great deal of labour in vain; anonymous critics might pounce upon the defenceless heads of fictitious candidates for fame and bread; reviews, from being novels founded upon facts, would aspire to be pure romances; and we should arrive at the beau ideal of a commonwealth of letters, at the euthanasia of thought, and millennium of criticism!

At the time that Sir Philip Sidney's 'Arcadia' was written, those middle-men, the critics, were not known. The author and