FOOTNOTES:
[137] What Dr. Johnson wrote is known;—he was accustomed to say that the admiration expressed for Milton was all cant.
[138] I have before me the pamphlet, entitled "A Narrative of the disinterment of Milton's coffin, on Wednesday the 4th of August, 1790, and of the treatment of the Corpse during that and the following day." The circumstances are too revolting to be dwelt upon.
[139] Si les Anges, (said Madame de Staël) n'ont pas été representés sous les traits de femme, c'est parceque l'union de la force avec la pureté, est plus belle et plus celeste encore que la modestie même la plus parfaite dans un être faible.
[140] See his life by Dr. Symmons, Dr. Todd, Newton, Hayley, Aubrey, Richardson, Warton.
"She (his daughter Deborah) spoke of him with great tenderness; she said he was delightful company, the life of the conversation, and that on account of a flow of subject, and an unaffected cheerfulness and civility," &c.—Richardson.
[141] She was Catherine Boyle, the daughter of the Great Earl of Cork, one of the most excellent and most distinguished women of that time.—See Hayley's Life of Milton.
[142] Miss Letitia Hawkins.
[143] Otherwise Amphiaraus: his story is told by Ovid. Met. B. 9.
[144] As Milton felt when he wrote—
And ever against eating cares,
Lap me in soft Lydian airs.
[145] Milton alludes to his father's talent for music:
Thyself
Art skilful to associate verse with airs
Harmonious, and to give the human voice
A thousand modulations.—
Such distribution of himself to us
Was Phœbus' choice; thou hast thy gift, and I
Mine also; and between us we receive,
Father and Son, the whole inspiring God!
ad patrem.
[146] There is extant a prose letter from Milton to Holstentius, the librarian of the Vatican, in which he accounts as one of his greatest pleasures at Rome, that of having known and heard Leonora.
[147] A Miss Davies. "The father (says Hayley) seems to have been a convert to Milton's arguments; but the lady had scruples. She possessed (according to Philips) both wit and beauty. A novelist could hardly imagine circumstances more singularly distressing to sensibility than the situation of the poet, if, as we may reasonably conjecture, he was deeply enamoured of this lady; if her father was inclined to accept him as a son-in-law, and the object of his love had no inclination to reject his suit, but what arose from a dread of his being indissolubly mated to another."—Life of Milton, p. 90.
—I, dark in light, exposed
To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,
Within doors or without, still as a fool
In power of others, never in my own, &c.
samson agonistes.
[149] Todd's Life of Milton—See also Milton's Will, which has been lately recovered, and published by Warton.
[150] Aubrey's Letters.
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