perhaps the most affecting. It is upon his best-beloved wife Catharine, the daughter of Captain Woodcock, of Hackney, a zealous Puritan. She died in child-bed, of a daughter, within a year of their marriage. The reader must not fail to notice the beautiful harmony of every portion of this exquisite piece. The allusion to Euripides, in the opening, is very fine. Milton had been long blind before this marriage. With great beauty, therefore, he represents "her face as veiled." He could have no conception of that face; but to him it appeared the presence of a beauty. His mind made pictures in his sleep, in dreams, and musings; and this was the day-time of his soul. What pathos does this lend to the last line?

"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 oh, as to embrace me she inclined,

I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night."

We have now glanced together through these despised sonnets. They are by no means unworthy even of Milton. Probably most of them were written in the stray intervals of his employment as the secretary of the Protector. They are his occasional visits to Poetry in a period when his time was employed with more serious occupations. Probably not one is the result of methodic study. It may further be said, the sonnet never should be the result of the epic disposition of the mind. Good sonnets can only be written by poets who can achieve greater things; and they should hang upon their works "like dew-drops on a lion's mane."

CHAPTER XIII.

MILTON AND JOHNSON.

For a very long time the life of Milton most referred to, and most frequently reprinted, was that by Dr. Johnson, the most malevolent piece of Biography ever penned. The mis-state

I

ments and falsehoods, the errors of ignorance and of inference, lie over the pages so very thickly strewn, that in this way it is a perfect literary curiosity. There are trifling errors of judgment, to which some reply might be given : for instance, where he says that the products of Milton's vernal fertility have been surpassed by many, and particularly by his contemporary Cowley. Cowley never wrote so fine a poem as "The Hymn on the Nativity," in all his life. Milton was but about twenty when he penned it; but if the life were crowded with errors of no more moment than this, they would be too contemptible for any extended refutation but it is the production of some of the basest moments of Johnson's life: he seems to revel in a kind of posthumous slander on this illustrious genius. He misses no opportunity of inuendo or abuse, and is to Milton dead, what Salmasius was to Milton living. Thus he assails, by inuendo, the poet's College days, those days crowned by industry, and signalised by the products of genius.

"I am ashamed to relate, what I fear is true, that Milton was one of the last of the students in either University, that suffered the public indignity of corporal correction." Todd, in his life of Milton, has sifted this allegation of

Johnson thoroughly. The flagellation of Milton, over which it is easy to perceive that Johnson chuckled, seems to be in fact what the tale of "The three Crows" is in fable. Every probability is against it: there is not a fact to support it. We may readily believe that some of Milton's foes would have gladly availed themselves of the report, especially More, Du Moulin, or Salmasius, had it been known during his life.

Upon this chapter, St. John remarks:

"The Rev. Mr. Mitford and Sir Egerton Brydges admit, perhaps too readily, that Milton underwent what, in University cant, is termed 'rustication.' That he was expelled from College, or subjected to personal chastisement, no one now believes; nor was there ever a man, not wholly blinded by prejudice, who could seriously entertain the opinion. Johnson, supposing he was serving his party, by reviving and giving currency to the calumny, prefaces his fiction with affected reluctance and concern. 'I am ashamed to relate,' he says, 'what I fear is true-Milton was one of the last students in either University that suffered the public indignity of corporal correction.' If he really felt shame, it was because he feared, or rather was persuaded, that what he was about to say was

not true. This could have been his only apprehension. To have discovered some foundation for his slander would to him have been matter of joy and gratulation, not of sorrow. His pretended fear, therefore, was as hypocritical as his narrative is destitute of truth."

When Johnson remarks upon Milton's declining to enter the Church (and it is probable he did this from the same notion which led him from the University), he says

"One of his objections to academical education, as it was then conducted, was, that men designed for orders in the Church were permitted to act plays-' writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antic and dishonest gestures of Trinculos, buffoons, and bawds, prostituting the shame of that ministry, which they had or were near having, to the eyes of the court ladies, their grooms, and mademoiselles.' This is sufficiently peevish in a man who, when he mentions his exile from College, relates with great luxuriance the compensations which the pleasures of the theatre afforded him. Plays were, therefore, only criminal when they were acted by academics."

What Johnson means by luxuriance in the passage just cited it is difficult to discover.