There was but one "vital sign" the absence of which in Milton could, according to any theory of the poetical character, have begotten doubts in his own mind, or in the minds of his friends, whether poetry was his peculiar and appropriate function. The single source of possible doubt on this head could have been no other than that native austerity of feeling and temper, that real though not formal Puritanism of heart and intellect, which we have noticed as distinguishing Milton from his youth upward. The poet, it is said in these days, when, by psychologizing a man, it is supposed we can tell what course of life he is fit for--the poet ought to be universally sympathetic; he ought to hate nothing, despise nothing. And a notion equivalent to this, though by no means so articulately expressed, was undoubtedly prevalent in Milton's own time. As the Puritans, on the one hand, had set their faces against all those practices of profane singing, dancing, masquing, theatre-going, and the like, in which the preservation of the spirit of the arts was supposed to be involved, so the last party in the world from which the reputed devotees of the arts in those days would have expected a poet to arise was that of the Puritans. Even in Shakespeare, and much more in Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other poets of the Elizabethan age, may be traced evidences of an instinctive enmity to that Puritanical mode of thinking which was then on the increase in English society, and in the triumph of which those great minds foresaw the proscription of their craft and their pleasures. When Sir Toby says to Malvolio, "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" and when the Clown adds, "Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' the mouth too," it is the Knight and the Clown on the one side against Malvolio the Puritan on the other. That the defence of the festive in this passage is not borne by more respectable personages than the two who speak is indeed a kind of indication that Shakespeare's personal feelings with regard to the austere movement which he saw gathering around him were by no means so deep or bitter as to discompose him; but, if his profounder soul could behold such things with serenity, and even pronounce them good, they assuredly met with enough of virulence and invective among his lesser contemporaries. That literary crusade against the Puritans, as canting, sour-visaged, mirth-forbidding, art-abhorring religionists, which came to its height at the time when Butler wrote his _Hudibras_, and Wycherley his plays, was already hot when the wits of King James's days used to assemble after the theatre, in their favourite taverns; and if, sallying out after one of their merry evenings in their most favourite tavern of all, the Mermaid in Bread Street, those assembled poets and dramatists had gone in search of the youth who was likeliest to be the poet of the age then