Oh! for my sake, do you with fortune chide,
The guilty goddess of my harmful deeds.
Or in a graver tone still,—
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful Earth,
Fooled by those rebel powers that thee array.
Upon the broad brows and in the deep eyes of Shakespeare I could believe myself to see, during the inditing of records such as this, a mournful expression which might pass with ease into the fixed pure look of Milton, and could identify, under circumstances of no violent transmutation, the lips which uttered, ‘What! because thou art virtuous, shall there be no cakes and ale? aye, and ginger be hot in the mouth?’ with those of him who closed his drama with the sentence that
If virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.
But such a fleeting similarity of transition, if there were, in the thoughtful countenance of the youthful Milton, was soon and totally effaced. He is a man of far different genius and character whom we see in the seventeen succeeding years of his prime, from his thirty-third to his fiftieth, teaching scholars and reforming education; married, and deserted, and propounding a new doctrine of divorce; taking a side in the great Civil War, joining in controversy with bishops and archbishops, acting as secretary to a republican government, and—
In Liberty’s defence, my noble task,