ceeding to that of Petrarch and Tasso, had nevertheless quite poetry enough as well as amiableness to relish

The golden fruit that worthy is
Of Galatea's purple kiss :-

but Milton, the last of our greater poets, was the last to maintain the dignity and beauty of natural and ancient taste;-the Hesperian gardens were shut;-and in strange company with "the mountain-nymph sweet Liberty," in came the Dragon Phantom Calvinism, whose breath even affected him for a while;

And in he came, with his eyes of flame,

The fiend to fetch the dead;

And all the place with his presence glowed,
Like a fiery furnace red.

Southey's Witch of Berkeley.

Milton, when he was young and happy, wrote Grecian mythology in his Lycidas and Comus; and hung, as it were, in the ears of antiquity those two exquisite jewels, the Pensieroso and

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L'Allegro. In his old age, there is good reason to suspect that he was, at any rate, not bigoted; and in the meantime, allusions to romance and to Greek mythology, which he never could prevail on himself to give up, are the most refreshing things in his Paradise Lost and Regained, next to the bridal happiness of poor Adam and Eve. They are not merely drops in the desart;—they are escapes from every heart-withering horror, which Eastern storms and tyranny could generate together. The light shed by Apollo's bow to the Argonauts, when they were benighted, is trivial refreshment to them.*

And here, while speaking of the original part of the book before us, I may as well make an explanation or two, which I should

* See this and other beautiful imaginations, particularly the passage of the same God by the sea-shore, and the apparition of Sthenelus, in the Argonautics of Apollonius Rhodius, whom Virgil thought better of than the critics,— which is just as it should be.

otherwise have thrown into the form of notes. They are merely, that a few of the pieces have appeared in print before; that the Epistles were originally written under the signature of Harry Brown, for a whim which is not worth explaining; and that the allusion in one of them, at p. cxi, is under the notion of a fanciful relationship to the once celebrated author Sir Thomas Brown. Of this singular person, who wrote the greatest and saddest nonsense with an air of the subtlest and most contented sense, I will also take an opportunity, not altogether misplaced, of saying a few words. He was author of the treatise on Vulgar Errors, in which he betrayed curious instances of what he refuted,-of another on Urn Burial, some of it very eloquent, intense, and earthy, and of the Religio Medici, in which he undertakes to give an account of a layman's faith. In this work he expresses a wish that the human race could be continued without the aid of the other sex, the

necessity for whom, with an exquisite coxcombry of the serious, he affects to think painful and mortifying,-forgetting, with the usual absurdity of ascetics, all the sentiment and social tenderness which a right sense of the sexual intercourse is calculated to produce. In the same book, he tells us, that in his opinion there are "not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith;" and that it was his solitary recreation to pose his apprehension with these involved riddles and enigmas of the divinity, with incarnation and resurrection. I love, says he, " to lose myself in a mystery, to pursue my reason to an Oh Altitudo!” His writings are of a piece with this announcement, credulous or not, just as his education inclines him, speculative to the last degree both of subtlety and sick fancy,―shewing himself abstractedly as liberal and humane as a virtuous wisdom could make him, and yet giving himself up, at a moment's notice from a dogma, to all the cruel exclusivenesses of

bigotry. He seems to have had the marvellous possession of the acuteness and fancifulness of melancholy without the uneasiness of it; unless, which is probable, he makes himself out to be, happier than he was, because he wished to be so; for his greatest quality at last, is an extraordinary egotism, not of a gross or contemptible kind, but the pride, while he thought himself most free from it, of raising himself on pinnacles of aspiration, and pretending to subject every particle of his virtue and even his wish for future happiness to the will of a superior being. The whole truth seems to be, that he was metaphysical to excess, and either from morbidity or a singular self-possession in the hypochondriacal region, literally pursued his impossible enquiries for their own sake, and for the enjoyment they gave him of his own subtlety, and not for any thing celestial which they contained. But he has great power of language, and a rapid succession of ideas amounting to