life; he was all spiritual. But he loved fame enthusiastically, and was ready to engage in the great affairs of public business; and when he did engage, performed his part with industry, skill, and courage. Courage, indeed, mingled, in a prominent degree, among his many other mighty and splendid qualities.

Who is equal to analyze a mind so rich, so powerful, so exquisite? I do not think that tenderness was his characteristic; and he was, above all other men, unyielding. His softer sensibilities were rather reflective than instantaneous: his sentiments came from his imagination, rather than his imagination from his senti

ments.

The vast fruits of his mind always resulted from complex ingredients; though they were so amalgamated that with him they became simple in their effects. It is impossible now to trace the processes of his intellect. We cannot tell what he would have been without study; but we know that he must have been great under any circumstances, though his greatness might have been of a different kind.

He made whatever he gathered from others his own; he only used it as an ingredient for his own combinations.

His earliest study seems to have been the holy writings: they first fed his fancy with the imagery of eastern poetry; and nowhere could he have found so sublime a nutriment. But what is any nutriment to him who cannot taste, digest, and be nourished? It depends not upon the force and excellence of what is conveyed; but upon the power of the recipient: it is, almost all, inborn genius, though it may be under the influence of some small modification from discipline.

Superficial minds, affecting the tone of wisdom, hold out that the gifts of the Muse are incompatible with serious business. Milton, the greatest of poets, affords a crushing answer to this. In the flower of his manhood, and through middle age, he was a statist, and active man of executive affairs in a crisis of unexampled difficulty and danger. His controversial writings, both in politics and divinity, are solid, vigorous, original, and practical; and yet he could return at last to the highest flights of the Muse, undamped and undimmed.

The lesson of his life is one of the most instructive that biography affords: it shows what various and dissimilar powers may be united in the same person, and what a grandeur of moral principles may actuate the human heart; but at the same time it shows how little all these combined talents and virtues can secure the due respect and regard of contemporaries. It is absurd to deny that Milton was neglected during his life, and that his

unworldlymindedness let the meanest of the people mount over his head. He lived poor, and for the most part in obscurity. Even high employments in the state seem to have obtained him no luxuries, and few friends or acquaintance: no brother poets flocked round him; none praised him, though in the habit of flattering each other.

If intellect is the grand glory of man, Milton stands pre-eminent above all other human beings; above Homer, Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Spenser, and Shakspeare! To the highest grandeur of invention upon the sublimest subject he unites the greatest wisdom and learning, and the most perfect art. Almost all other poets sink into twinkling stars before him. What has issued from the French school of poetry seems to be the production of an inferior order of beings, and in this I include even our Dryden and Pope; for I cannot place these two famous men among the greatest poets: they may be among the first of a secondary class.

It is easy to select fine passages from minor poetical authors; but a great poet must be tried by his entirety-by the uniform texture of his web.

Milton has a language of his own; I may say, invented by himself. It is somewhat hard, but it is all sinew: it is not ver nacular, but has a Latinized cast, which requires a little time to reconcile a reader to it. It is best fitted to convey his own magnificent ideas: its very learnedness impresses us with respect: it moves with a gigantic step: it does not flow, like Shakspeare's style, nor dance, like Spenser's. Now and then there are transpositions somewhat alien to the character of the English language, which is not well calculated for transposition; but in Milton this is perhaps a merit, because his lines are pregnant with deep thought and sublime imagery, which require us to dwell upon them, and contemplate them over and over. He ought never to be read rapidly: his is a style which no one ought to imitate till he is endowed with a soul like Milton's. His ingredients of learning are so worked into his original thoughts that they form a part of them; they are never patches.

MILTON AND GRAY COMPARED.

One should like to imagine the difference of early character, habits, sentiments, pursuits, conduct and temper, between Milton and Gray; both sons of men following the same calling, both living in the bustle of the city, and both addicted to literary occu

pations. There was this primary difference, that Milton had a good father, and Gray a bad one.

Milton was probably more stern; Gray more tender and morbid : Milton more confident and aspiring; Gray more fearful and hopeless. Each loved books and learning, and each had an exquisite taste. Milton was more vigorous; Gray more nice. Both were imaginative and fond of romantic fiction; but Milton was more enterprising. Gray's fastidiousness impeded him; he was

A puny insect, shivering at a breeze.

Milton was dauntless, defiant, and, when insulted, fierce; perhaps ferocious: nothing shook his self-reliance. Gray was driven back even by a frown.

The "Elegiac Bard" might have done tenfold more than he did if he had been more courageous, but could never have done what Milton has done: he had not the same invention, nor the same natural sublimity. Milton was far the happier being, though he engaged in controversies which Gray's peaceful spirit would have avoided. Milton was a practical statesman; Gray would have been utterly unfit to engage in affairs of state.

Gray's spirits were partly broken by the unprincipled and brutal conduct of his father to his mother; but they were naturally low: his inborn sensitiveness amounted to disease. He seems to have been more delicate and more precise in his classical scholarship, and more exact in all his knowledge; but it was not so mingled up with original thought, and therefore not so valuable: his memory was often mere memory, and therefore was exact. This did not arise from inability, but from timidity and indolence: he lived in the solemn and monotonous cloisters of a college; he had nothing of the ordinary movements of life to excite him: all the faculties of his mind, therefore, except his memory, were often stagnant. The memory works best when the passions are least moved.

The dim, misty, gray hues of vacant despondence will chill the lips and palsy the voice. Who fears the ridicule or censure of men, but anticipates not the cheer of triumph, will want the sources of energy and enterprise. The blood must glow in the veins, and the heart must dance, to enable us to do great things. We cannot doubt that this was the case with Milton: many noble passages regarding himself in his prose works prove it: he nursed glorious and holy hopes from his childhood. Afterwards, in the midst of the foulest calumnies, he was undaunted and undismayed. Even in the most perilous times, when the ban of proscription and the sword of death were hanging over his head,

he conceived and partly composed his "Paradise Lost." He had a spring of soul which nothing could relax.

Magnanimity grows strong by opposition and difficulty; and when a difficulty is conquered, the energy is doubled; no one knows what powers are in him till he is pressed: when they come out from pressure, hope and confidence come with them. It is not till after we have been tried that we trust to ourselves: then we stand unmoved by the blast, and laugh at the storm. All genuine power grows more vigorous after it has been tried.

Thousands go down to the grave, unconscious of the native faculties which, if exercised, might have distinguished them: but buried faculties are an incumbrance, and breed diseases; and it cannot be doubted that this was one of the maladies of Gray. Milton was never to be silenced: the fire within found vent; and then his great heart was at ease, and triumphed.

GIBBON.

Gibbon had not the courage to give to the world his "Autobiography" during his life. He was a wonderful man, but he had many vanities and some weaknesses. Colman has given a curious portrait of him, as inserted in a note of Croker's "Boswell." Rich as he was in erudition, and surely in genius-for what but genius could have put together in so luminous a manner such an incredible extent of chaotic materials?-he yet was in his manners and person a finical coxcomb. He lived in an age of ceremonials, which have now passed away; and he had a silly desire to be thought a man of fashion and fine gentleman-a mean ambition for a man of such a splendid and accomplished mind. But these little passions were superseded by more noble ones; and he retired with an elevated courage to Lausanne, to spend his latter days in literature and his own thoughts, and the beautiful scenery of Switzerland, and on the banks of the sublime Genevan lake. His "Memoirs" are pleasing, and will always be an instructive record of indefatigable literary toil; but they are not, to my taste, of the highest class of memoirs; they partake a little of the quaintness of the author's manners. He appears too much in his full dress. They want energy, and simplicity, and frankness, and high bursts of eloquence.

DOCTOR JOHNSON.

Boswell's summary of Johnson's character does not seem to me very well done. Johnson was a moral philosopher and a critic, but had little fancy and no imagination. His strength lay in his quick powers of discrimination, and the ready and forcible language in which he expressed it. His opinions were the result of observation and reasoning, not of invention; and where he had imagery by way of illustration, it was seldom or never of a poetical character. There was a directness and self-confidence in his manner, which gave an effect to many things he said, not intrinsically due to them. He had been a great thinker, and therefore was prepared upon most subjects presented to him. He had read much by fits, and had digested what he had read.

But his mind was bent to analyze, detect faults, and destroy charms. His ambition was to be the evil magician, at the touch of whose spear delusions fled.

His "Rasselas" and his "Tour to the Hebrides" are supposed to have a poetical cast of language; but even here his images are vague, and his words more sounding than picturesque; they are oratorical more than poetical; there is more of swell than solidity.

He always spoke ex cathedrâ, and had none but submissive listeners. He had lived among the chief literati of the metropolis, at least from his twenty-fifth year, and was a master of the literary history of his own time. He reflected upon facts, not upon visions and therefore always seemed to have the acuteness of practical good sense.

On almost all occasions he reasoned rather than felt, and therefore had little sentiment. What he wrote critically came from the processes of his own mind, and what he wrote ornamentally was rather derived from the stores of his memory.

He was an author to whom the booksellers were always glad to have resort, because on any proposed subject he had a prepared mind, and language always at his command.

But, as he admitted nothing which stern reason cannot demonstrate, he neither communicated nor secretly cherished any of those spiritual dreams in which a poet delights. Such a mind is better fitted for conversation, because what it communicates is more comprehensible by the generality of auditors. His desire of victory was so excessive as to be unjust, and his resentment of contradiction ferocious.

Envy and jealousy had such dominion over him as to make