(See vol. ii. p. 1.)
Sir,—The following passage from the pen of the greatest critic of modern times, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, seems rather to militate against the argument in a former number of the Antiquarian Magazine, that the portrait of Milton there spoken of might have been painted by the poet himself: “It is very remarkable that in no part of his writings does Milton take any notice of the great painters of Italy, nor, indeed, of painting as an art, whilst every other page breathes his love and taste for music. Yet it is curious that in one passage of the “Paradise Lost” Milton has certainly copied the fresco of the Creation in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. I mean those lines—
“Now half appeared
The tawny lion, pawing to get free
His hinder parts; then springs as broke from bonds,
And rampant shakes his brinded mane,” &c.;
an image which the necessities of the painter justified, but which was wholly unworthy, in my judgment, of the enlarged powers of the poet. Adam bending over the sleeping Eve in the “Paradise Lost” (book vii. 463), and Delilah approaching Sampson in the “Agonistes” (book v. 8), are the only two proper pictures I remember in Milton.
F. H.
OLD BELLMEN’S BROADSIDES.
(See vol. v. p. 221.)
Sir,—It may be interesting to some of your readers to know that these quaint poetical productions continued to be issued by the bellmen of the city of Hereford down to the year 1835, and perhaps even later.
I have in my collection of Herefordian matters a series of six of them as follows:
(1) A copy of verses | for 1811 | Humbly presented to all my worthy Masters and Mistresses | in the City of Hereford | by James Lingham | Bellman and Crier of the said City. This has a quaint 17th century woodcut of the bellman, with bell in right hand, staff and lanthorn in left, accompanied by his dog. In background to left a house, with cock crowing on roof, to right a church, probably intended to represent St. Peter’s. The bellman wears a three-cornered hat, a long-skirted coat, confined at waist with belt, with a short coat underneath, embroidered down the front. Street shown as paved in chequers, as in the engraving in your Antiquarian Magazine. W. H. Parker, printer, Hereford.