The peculiarities of the austere type of character stand out in Milton more remarkably than in other men who partake of it, because of the extreme strength of his nature. In reading him this is the first thing that strikes us. We seem to have left the little world of ordinary writers. The words of some authors are said to have ‘hands and feet;’ they seem, that is, to have a vigour and animation which only belong to things which live and move. Milton’s words have not this animal life. There is no rude energy about them. But, on the other hand, they have, or seem to have, a soul, a spirit which other words have not. He was early aware that what he wrote, ‘by certain vital signs it had,’ was such as the world would not ‘willingly let die.’ After two centuries we feel the same. There is a solemn and firm music in the lines; a brooding sublimity haunts them; the spirit of the great writer moves over the face of the page. In life there seems to have been the same peculiar strength that his works suggest to us. His moral tenacity is amazing. He took his own course, and he kept his own course; and we may trace in his defects the same characteristics. ‘Energy and ill-temper,’ some say, ‘are the same thing;’ and though this is a strong exaggeration, yet there is a basis of truth in it. People who labour much will be cross if they do not obtain that for which they labour; those who desire vehemently will be vexed if they do not obtain that which they desire. As is the strength of the impelling tendency, so, other things being equal, is the pain which it will experience if it be baffled. Those, too, who are set on what is high will be proportionately offended by the intrusion of what is low. Accordingly, Milton is described by those who knew him as a ‘harsh and choleric man.’ ‘He had,’ we are told, ‘a gravity in his temper, not melancholy, or not till the latter part of his life,—not sour, not morose, not ill-natured; but a certain severity of mind, not condescending to little things;’—and this, although his daughter remembered that he was delightful company, the life of conversation, and that he was so ‘on account of a flow of subjects and an unaffected cheerfulness and civility.’ Doubtless this may have been so when he was at ease, and at home. But there are unmistakable traces of the harsher tendency in almost all his works.