All republicans have a special interest in studying the genius and character of Milton. He took no pleasure as did the great dramatic poet, in exalting the prerogatives, or setting forth the splendors of royalty. For this he was calumniated by his enemies, and even Johnson, the inveterate old tory, joins in the censure of the politician and civilian, while he praises the poet in such language as this: “He seems to have been well acquainted with his own genius, and to know what it was that nature had bestowed upon him, more bountifully than upon others; the power of displaying the vast, illuminating the splendid, enforcing the awful, darkening the gloomy, and aggravating the dreadful.” He could not stoop to trifle among kings and queens, or attempt to make them conspicuous by his eulogies or representations. He rose to the sublimities of supernal worlds. “He sent his faculties out upon discovery, into worlds where only imagination can travel, and delighted to form new modes of existence and furnish sentiment and action to superior beings, to trace the counsels of hell, or accompany the choirs of heaven.” His communion with the pure, the spiritual, the invisible, strengthened the principles of conduct he had adopted in his anticipation of the judgment of posterity, and especially in his consciousness of being “in his great Taskmaster’s eye.” In Comus, his youthful imagination luxuriates amid the freshness of its own beautiful creations, amid the wealth which was destined to enrich the world. Upon the ground of a pure moral sentiment the flowers of poesy are distributed in the most free and graceful manner. There is no pandering to the baser passions of the human heart; no prostitution of the charms of his muse to the purposes of a secret, sinful gratification on the part of his readers; no seductive attempt to “impair the strength of better thoughts,” or to weaken the sanctions of that immutable law, which binds together virtue and happiness, vice and misery. His amaranthine wreath maybe wet with the “dew of heaven,” such as descended on his own Paradise, but is never stained with tears such as innocence weeps, when corrupted by guilt. “His diadem of beauty,” is set with gems of the purest water, and most sparkling colors. The “Lady,” who is wandering in the recesses of the forest, apprehensive perhaps, of being assailed by prowling foes, appeals in fervent language: Oh welcome, pure-eyed Faith; whitehanded Hope, Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings! And thou, unblemished form of Chastity! I see ye visibly——