Sir Gawain,) and his truly 'enlightened' understanding. Indeed, we very much question whether a writer, who carries with him a just feeling of his allegiance--a truly loyal writer--can lawfully suppose his sovereign, the reader, peccable or capable of error; and whether there is not even a shade of impiety in conceiving him liable to the affections of sleep, or of yawning. Having thus, upon our knees as it were, done feudal homage to our great _suzerain_, the reader--having propitiated him with Persian adorations and with Phrygian genuflexions, let us now crave leave to convert him a little. Convert him!--that sounds '_un pen fort_,' does it not? No, not at all. A cat may look at a king; and upon this or that out-of-the-way point a writer may presume to be more knowing than his reader--the serf may undertake to convert his lord. The reader is a great being--a great noun-substantive; but still, like a mere adjective, he is liable to the three degrees of comparison. He may rise above himself--he may transcend the ordinary level of readers, however exalted that level be. Being great, he may become greater. Full of light, he may yet labor with a spot or two of darkness. And such a spot we hold the prevalent opinion upon Milton in two particular questions of taste--questions that are not insulated, but diffusive; spreading themselves over the entire surface of the _Paradise Lost_, and also of the _Paradise Regained_; insomuch that, if Milton is wrong once, then he is wrong by many scores of times. Nay, which transcends all counting of cases or numerical estimates of error, if, in the separate instances, (be they few or be they many,) he is truly and indeed wrong--then he has erred, not by the case but by the principle; and that is a thousand times worse; for a separate case or instance of error may escape any man--may have been overlooked amongst the press of objects crowding on his eye; or, if _not_ overlooked, if passed deliberately, may plead the ordinary privilege of human frailty. The man erred; and his error terminates in itself. But an error of principle does _not_ terminate in itself; it is a fountain; it is self-diffusive; and it has a life of its own. The faults of a great man are in any case contagious; they are dazzling and delusive by means of the great man's general example. But his false principles have a worse contagion. They operate not only through the general haze and halo which invests a shining example; but even if transplanted where that example is unknown, they propagate themselves by the vitality inherent in all self-consistent principles, whether true or false.