Dr. Blair's parallel between Homer and Milton, throws more light upon the true character of Milton's mind, so far as sublimity is concerned, than anything I have seen. "Homer's (sublimity) is generally accompanied with fire and impetuosity; Milton's possesses more of a calm and amazing grandeur. Homer warms and hurries us along; Milton fixes us in a state of astonishment and elevation. Homer's sublimity appears most in the description of actions; Milton's in that of wonderful and stupendous objects." I would further apply a remark which I have seen in the "table talk" of Coleridge, the poet, upon the sublimity of Schiller, and that of Shakspeare. "Both are sublime, but Homer's is the material sublime."
These remarks are confined to his sublimity; but beauty, tender beauty, was on the catalogue of his excellencies. I heard a lady once liken Milton's mind to a sea shell. The wildest and most terrible blasts, the gentlest and most honeyed breathings issue from the same secret depths.
Milton has many singularities. One which, Addison I believe, praises, is a habit of repeating in the answer the words of the question. Take for example, these lines in Comus:
| "Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud Turn forth her silver lining on the night? I did not err: there does a sable cloud Turn forth her silver lining on the night."17 |
17 The reader will remember a beautiful instance of this in "Alroy," a work brimful of genius.
He was also a pedant; but pedantry should only call forth censure, when coupled with weakness. He used inversion to excess; about the propriety of which no two critics agree. And any other faults than these excusable ones, it would be difficult to discover.
In his Sampson Agonistes, he manifested great solidity and power: in his Lycidas, the most exquisitely pathetic elegance; in his Comus, a fine wandering philosophy. All these qualities were united in his Paradise Lost, and (in not so great a degree, however,) in the "Paradise Regained."
As a man, John Milton has been accused of time-serving. The truth of this charge is rather problematical. Milton was no more a time-server, so far at least as I am able to discover, than any timid old man living in his troubled age, would have been, from fear. Terror led him into acts assuredly mean; but that terror should be his excuse; it overruled a natural soundness and rectitude of heart. However, meanness it was, and the reason that he has had his fame injured, is a simple one. A beautiful thing, when at all tainted, is more disgusting than if a greater taint were upon one less beautiful.
"Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."
X. Butler,18 the comic satirist, was well drugged with the burlesque sentiments and humorous conceits so prevalent in the reign of Charles the second.