Masson’s rambling history of the seventeenth century “is interrupted now and then,” says Lowell, “by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what _he_ has been doing in the meanwhile.” Blinded by the dust of old papers which Masson ransacks, to discover that they have no relation to his hero, the critic compares the ponderous biography to Allston’s picture of Elijah in the wilderness, “where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape, where the very ravens could scarce have found him out.” This characterization of Edinburgh by Harvard will certainly inspire suggestion, if it does not awaken hope; but Lowell’s right to criticise the sedate and prolix gentleman who occupies in the Scottish metropolis the chair which he himself fills at Cambridge does not rest, as we have already seen in the essay on Dante, on Susarion’s faculty of turning the serious and dull into actual comedy. Like all who have recently written of Milton—with the exception of Masson—Lowell looks upon him as a being “set apart.” To idealize the author of _Paradise Lost_ is quite as natural as to idealize Dante, notwithstanding their relative distances from us; but in the former case, with Lowell, it is the idealization of admiring awe; in the latter, of tender and exquisitely appreciative love. He does not appear to hold Milton in any degree of the personal affection which he feels for the inspired Florentine, but is constrained to insist that Masson is disrespectful toward his subject, and that “Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with impunity.” When Lowell writes of Milton’s literary style, although he does it sparingly, every stroke is a master’s. His estimate of Milton as a man is calm, judicial, and courageous. “He stands out,” he says, “in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great movement of the civil war, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man.” It is the habit of hurried teachers of our day, who have to teach so many more things than they know, to exalt Milton “High on a throne of royal state,”