The essay on Milton is devoted rather to Mr. David Masson than to the poet. There is nothing to indicate that the critic is in love with either the poems or the personality of the sublime Puritan who officiated in the capacity of Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell, and who devoted himself to epic verse after his services ceased to be available for the oppression of his fellow-men. Still less is he enamored of Mr. David Masson as a biographer of Milton, and the jovial though thoroughly effective manner in which he demonstrates the Scotch professor’s unfitness for this office adds to his volume a flavor of pungency which brings back happy recollections of the “Table for Critics.” Masson is very voluminous and exasperatingly given to remote and often irrelevant detail; and Macaulay, in extinguishing some of the literary pretenders of his time, was never more dextrous than Lowell in this grotesque joust at the Edinburgh professor’s faults, nor half so witty. Referring to the length of the biography—there are eight volumes octavo of the _Life_ and _Works_—Lowell says with perfect gravity: “We envy the secular leisures of Methuselah, and are thankful that _his_ biography, at least (if written in the same longeval proportion), is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject that would have been for a person of Mr. Masson’s spacious predilections!” And he goes on to say: “It is plain, from the preface to the second volume, that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that Milton ought to be more than a mere incident of his own biography.” Masson, on the other hand, is of opinion “that, whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the subject from the outside,” no one can study Milton without being obliged to study also the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland; whereupon Lowell retorts that, even for a hasty person, eleven years is “rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere he begins his next sentence.”