‘Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave, Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint. Mine, as whom wash’d from spot of child-bed taint Purification in the old law did save, And such, as yet once more I trust to have Full sight of her in Heav’n without restraint, Came vested all in white, pure as her mind: Her face was veil’d, yet to my fancied sight Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined So clear, as in no face with more delight: But O as to embrace me she inclined, I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night.’ There could not have been a greater mistake or a more unjust piece of criticism than to suppose that Milton only shone on great subjects; and that on ordinary occasions and in familiar life, his mind was unwieldy, averse to the cultivation of grace and elegance, and unsusceptible of harmless pleasures. The whole tenour of his smaller compositions contradicts this opinion, which however they have been cited to confirm. The notion first got abroad from the bitterness (or vehemence) of his controversial writings, and has been kept up since with little meaning and with less truth. His Letters to Donatus and others are not more remarkable for the display of a scholastic enthusiasm, than for that of the most amiable dispositions. They are ‘severe in youthful virtue unreproved.’ There is a passage in his prose-works (the Treatise on Education) which shews, I think, his extreme openness and proneness to pleasing outward impressions in a striking point of view. ‘But to return to our own institute,’ he says, ‘besides these constant exercises at home, there is another opportunity of gaining experience to be won from pleasure itself abroad. _In those vernal seasons of the year, when the air is calm and pleasant, it were an injury and sullenness against nature, not to go out and see her riches, and partake in her rejoicing with Heaven and earth._ I should not therefore be a persuader to them of studying much then, but to ride out in companies with prudent and well staid guides, to all quarters of the land,’ &c. Many other passages might be quoted, in which the poet breaks through the ground-work of prose, as it were, by natural fecundity and a genial, unrestrained sense of delight. To suppose that a poet is not easily accessible to pleasure, or that he does not take an interest in individual objects and feelings, is to suppose that he is no poet; and proceeds on the false theory, which has been so often applied to poetry and the Fine Arts, that the whole is not made up of the particulars. If our author, according to Dr. Johnson’s account of him, could only have treated epic, high-sounding subjects, he would not have been what he was, but another Sir Richard