What wonder then if I delight to hear Her dictates from thy mouth? most men admire To whom our Saviour with unalter'd brow. 482. most men admire Virtue, who follow not her lore:] Imitated from the well known saying of Medea, Ov. Met. vii. 20. -Video meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor. 490. —and vouchsaf'd his voice To Balaam reprobate,] An argument more plausible and more fallacious could not have been put into the mouth of the Tempter. Perfectly to apprehend this remarkable piece of Scripture history, as well as the poet's judicious use of it in this place, we may refer to Bishop Butler's excellent Sermon on the character of Balaam, and to Shuckford's account of it in his 485 490 495 Connexion of Sacred and Profane 497. and Satan bowing low His -and in celestial measures mov'd, Thyer. When criticism is employed on words alone, it may deserve Mr. Thyer's censure; but it His gray dissimulation, disappear'd Into thin air diffus'd: for now began Night with her sullen wings to double-shade 500 must sometimes condescend to notice them; and in this instance it may safely pronounce that Milton would not have admitted into the Par. Lost so forced and affected an expression as " bowing low his gray dissimulation." The meaning indeed is perfectly clear. Satan is still, as Mr. Dunster observes, under his assumed character of " "an aged man in rural weeds." But the words which he quotes from our author's Latin poem on the fifth of November, (where Satan is also introduced under the disguise of an old Franciscan friar,) -assumptis micuerunt tempora canis, if " equivalent to his gray dissimulation here," are free from the conceit which we have blamed above. E. 498. -disappear'd -nigras nox contrahit alas. And Tasso, viii. 57. and Spenser, Faery Queen, b. vi. c. viii. 44. -and now the even-tide His broad black wings had through the heavens wide By this dispread. But he might also have remarked, that not one of these poets applies any other epithet to the wings of night than one expressive of material qualities; Milton heightens the poetry of the image by introducing the qualities of mind-sullen wings. And thus in l'Allegro, 6. Where brooding darkness spreads her jealous wings. Fairfax indeed has added a similar idea to Tasso's description, viii. 57. Sorgea la notte in tanto, e sotto l'ali So Virgil of Mercury, En. iv. which is thus translated by Fair 278. fax, But now the night dispread her lazy wings Oe'r the broad fields of heaven's bright wilderness. E. 500. to double-shade The desert;] He has expressed the same thought in Comus, 335. In double night of darkness, and of shades. [Where see the notes.] And the reader will naturally observe how properly the images are taken from the place, where the scene is laid. It is not a descrip The desert; fowls in their clay nests were couch'd; And now wild beasts came forth the woods to roam. tion of night at large, but of a night in the desert; and, as Mr. Thyer says, is very short, though poetical. The reason no doubt was, because the poet had before laboured this scene to the utmost perfection in his Paradise Lost. |