In the admiration only of weak minds
Led captive; cease to admire, and all her plumes
Fall flat, and shrink into a trivial toy,
At every sudden slighting quite abashed.
It is a great loss to literature that Mrs. Millamant, the delightful heroine of Congreve's comedy, was no reader of Milton. Her favourite author was Suckling:--
I prithee spare me, gentle boy,
Press me no more for that slight toy,
That foolish trifle of a heart.
If she had a copy of the Paradise Regained, doubtless it stood in some conspicuous place, and was never opened,--like Mrs. Wishfort's "books over the chimney--Quarles and Prynne, and 'The Short View of the Stage,' with Bunyan's works, to entertain you." But all unawares she has answered the contention of Satan:--"O the vanity of these men!--Fainall, d'ye hear him? If they did not commend us, we were not handsome! Now you must know that they could not commend one, if one was not handsome. Beauty the lover's gift!--Lord, what is a lover, that it can give? ... One no more owes one's beauty to a lover than one's wit to an echo."
Like most men of an impressionable temperament and a strong will, Milton was not sympathetic, nor curious to place himself where he might see the world from a point of view other than his own. Besieged by their sensations and impressions, concerned above all things with maintaining their opinions and enforcing their beliefs on others, such men find enough to do within the citadel of their own personality. To judge from some passages of his works, one half of the human race was to Milton an illusion to which the other half was subject. One who is in love with his own ideas cannot but be disappointed alike with existing institutions and with the tissue of surprises that is a person. Milton's disappointment, which had inspired the early Divorce pamphlets, finds renewed expression in Adam's prophecy of unhappy marriages--a notable parallel to the similar prophecy in Venus and Adonis--