drug the potion high which they have not the leisure to make delicate; and, above all, they take the materials nearest at hand, and which may be compounded with the least labour or skill. As ever happens in such cases, things act and re-act on one another; and while the constant and easy supply of highly, though coarsely seasoned matter, vitiates the appetite more and more, this degradation renders it necessary to make the stuff more coarse and more stinging to the palate. The necessities of the Quarterly Purveyor are considerably less urgent and less hurtful in this respect; but we are very far indeed from standing aloof, taking ourselves out of the caste to which we belong, and, with folded arms and self-satisfied aspect, thanking God that we are not as other writers are. Nay, we know, we lament, and we complain, that we have often had the charge, the awful charge-of dulness, or heaviness, brought against Numbers of this Journal, containing various papers of the utmost ability, the greatest originality, the purest composition, on subjects of the highest importance, but,-not variegated or set off by what are called brilliant or striking articles. We hope that we have not often yielded to such clamours in the exercise of our functions; but we are conscious, upon the retrospect, of having been sometimes compelled to surrender our own better judgment to the prevailing taste; although, upon the graver charges which we have been discussing, our principle has uniformly been to abide by the standard, long established, of correct taste; to make head against all innovations in it; and to cry down all base coin by whomsoever uttered. Yet, let us add, that as evil example is eminently contagious, the corruption of which we are complaining has extended to works, the composition of which offered no such excuse as the necessities of Periodical publication; and the subject of which rendered the offence far more inexplicable. The scientific writings of later years have been debased by the vitious taste, the foolish vanity of running after ornaments on matters that deny themselves to the ornamental; and should be content with the didactic. The yearly assemblages of scientific men-professedly to argue and confer, where investigation or even consultation is utterly impossible, really to display themselves before multitudes wholly incapable of appreciating any valuable matter uttered before them, and only likely to comprehend the trash unavoidably spoken upon such occasions-have greatly lowered the standard of taste among our men of science. There lies before us a book in which you can perpetually trace an unnatural twisting of the subject under consideration for a page or more, and cannot tell what it is the author is running after; till behold a long quotation in blank verse or rhyme makes its appearance, and shows that all the effort was to introduce it. Another really writes on some of the stricter sciences in trope and metaphor; nor he among the least of our mathematicians. A third, and one the greatest of all, will have it that Laplace's great work is a kind of scientific poem.' Let us hope that the contagion will spread no further; or, if it does, that we shall no longer speak of French tinsel; for, assuredly, no name of any renown, amongst our neighbours, can be cited as giving the least countenance to aberrations like these. The offenders should learn to be content with their own domains, and bear in mind, that even if they possessed the arts, the inferior arts, of the orator and the poet, to use them on their own subjects or in any connexion with these, would be just as absurd as if Mr Wordsworth or Mr Campbell were to put Euclid into a ballad, or an orator at some public meeting were to declaim upon the principles of dynamics. It remains that we say something respecting the substance of Dr Channing's tract; although we have already stated that it is the faulty style and the heterodox critical matter which induced us to undertake this discussion. Some, however, of the same errors also pervade the opinions which he delivers respecting Milton, although here we find far more that is valuable and deserving of unqualified commendation. He has a strong and lively sense (as who, indeed, in these days has not?) of the prodigious merits of that great man, both as a poet and a citizen; nor are these, as might be expected, lessened in his eyes, by the accident which makes the modern and the ancient republican, the Unitarians of the nineteenth and the seventeenth century, the Independents who abhor church establishments on either side of the Atlantic, coincide in all their opinions, religious as well as political. Our author's, however, is a discriminating and sober, not a blind admiration; he feels the beauties of the illustrious poet as a critic, not as a partizan; and if he sometimes misplaces his praise, and sometimes fancies he is discovering beauties long since well known and universally admired, we can pardon these little excesses, proceeding, as they do, from a laudable fondness for so noble and so inspiring a theme. Thus, after describing his almost unrivalled sublimity and immense power-though somewhat as if neither Homer nor Dante had ever lived he adds, His sublimity is in every man's mouth: is it felt that his poetry breathes a sensibility and tenderness hardly surpassed by its sublimity ?' After some not very happy remarks, and, truth to say, not very intelligible, on great minds, 'being masters of their own enthusiasm,' and 'having a sensibility more intense and enduring,' and being more self-pos'sessed and less perturbed than those of other men, and therefore less observed and felt, except by those who understand, through 6 6 'their own consciousness, the workings and utterance of genuine 'feelings' he gives instances to prove that Milton could write with pathos and tenderness. Two are from Comus ;' and the discovery made by Dr Channing through this congenial feeling and consciousness' to other men denied, is the unknown passage beginning, Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould.' After this we are the less surprised at the other unknown passage of 'Paradise Lost,' now brought to light, painting our first parents meeting in the morning, in which every other line is still as much the subject of constant quotations as Hamlet's soliloquy -e. g., ' Heaven's last best gift,' the bee 'extracting liquid sweet,' 'temperate vapours bland,' &c. &c. But it is as well to note that he does not quote a far better instance, and one very much less hackneyed by the followers of Dr Pangloss, namely, Adam's address to Eve, beginning, 'Sweet is the breath of morn when she ascends With charm of earliest birds,' &c. There is a great deal said, and certainly not too much, on the character of Satan; but of all the magical power displayed by the great bard, we believe there is none more transcendent, and none where his truly original genius more appears than in his picture of Death,-by Milton first made awful and horrid, without any mean or low association,-because by him first severed from the picture of a skeleton, and involved in impenetrable and terrible obscurity, which for that very reason, we may add in passing, Fuseli never should have committed the gross blunder of endeavouring to paint, because, for that very reason, the subject was necessarily withdrawn from the dominion of the pencil. Indeed, nothing is so remarkable as the manner in which Milton always sustains the same idea as often as he has occasion to mention the dreadful and hated being-never delineating one trait by which a picture can be formed in the imagination-never realizing a lineament in any material form, but ever keeping up the fear and the hatred which he had associated with the idea. He is the ' grisly horror' the execrable thing' the grim feature;' as when he paints, or seems to paint him, delighted at the Fall, after describing the joy of vultures over a distant battle which they scent from on high So scented the grim feature, and upturned But we are falling into Dr Channing's error-smit with the 'love of sacred song:' only it is singular that he should make no allusion whatever to this extraordinary portion of Lost.' Paradise We think, too, that no sound critic of a manly understanding should have treated of the subject without entering his protest against the pedantic, affected displeasure shown by Addison upon one famous passage, and all the more strange in an acknowledged wit and even humourist, as well as man of undoubted taste; but it is plain that the parson in the tye-wig' got the better of the author of the Drummer.' We allude to his somewhat sharp censure on the striking and happy picture of the fiends' mirthful joking, perhaps imitated from, or at least suggested by, Dante's famous dialogue between Sinon and Adamo in the 'Inferno.' It is remarkable that Addison seems really unable to find any other matter of blame in the whole twelve Books; though assuredly the harshness of some parts, and the dulness of others, which have, as Johnson truly observed, given Paradise Lost' so many more examiners than readers, might have furnished better scope for criticism. From the poetry, Dr Channing turns to the prose writings of Milton; and he at once pronounces it to be a lesson long known to the initiated, and which the public are now learning, that they 'contain passages hardly inferior to his best poetry, and that they are marked throughout with the same vigorous mind which gave us Paradise Lost. Now, as we are not amongst the initiated, we must take leave to pause upon this dictum, which prefaces the eulogy upon obscure composition already cited and discussed. We entirely deny the superlative merits of Milton's prose compositions; without, of course, doubting that they have great beauties of a certain kind, and contain occasionally fine passages. Nor is our denial grounded, as Dr Channing would suppose, from his defence of obscurity, upon that or upon their difficulty, for indeed we do not see any obscurity or difficulty in them; but they are written in a style the reverse of natural ; the matter is always, or almost always, very inferior to the silted diction; the author is ever labouring to look big; he is making a vast noise, and you cannot tell why; he is writing about it, and about it, without coming to the point. Nor is his diction, either in the arrangement, or the words, any thing like English. Does any one really believe that we should use a language such as the following-only remarkable for its involution, and for being pompous, whilst it says nothing? It is part of a passage cited by our author as exemplifying Milton's noble style. Conceiving, therefore, this wayward subject against Prelaty, the touching whereof is so distasteful and disquietous to a number of men, as by what hath been said I may deserve of my readers to be credited, that neither envy nor gall hath entered ever upon this controversy, but the en'forcement of conscience only, and a preventive fear least the ' omitting of this duty should be against me, when I would store 6 up to myself the good provision of peaceful hours.' Nor do we much more admire the description of poetry ending withWhatsoever in religion is holy and sublime, in virtue amiable or grave; whatever hath passion or admiration in all the changes of that which is called fortune from without, or the wily subtil'ties or refluxes of man's thoughts; all these things, with a solid and treatable smoothness, to point out and describe.' So where he alludes to his immortal work then planned, possibly begun, he describes it as not to be raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine, like that which flows at waste from the, pen of 'some vulgar amourant, or the trencher fury of a rhyming para'site, nor to be obtained by the provocation of Dame Memory and her syren daughters.' Again, he speaks of God and his " secretary, conscience,' and 'a conscience that could retch.' The prayer at the end of the Reformation in England' has been always much admired; and its impressive and solemn magnificence is not denied, any more than that so great an occasion as prayer to the Most High justifies lofty diction. Yet how does it conclude? In supereminence of beatific vision, progressing the ' dateless and irrevoluble circle of eternity, shall clasp insepar'able hands with joy and bliss in over measure for ever. Now, when we humbly venture to reject this style altogether (and we might give far worse samples, for indeed these are taken from the very finest passages), we have on our side no less than the high authority of Milton himself, to set against Dr Channing's. Who ever could trace the faintest resemblance to such diction in any of those divine compositions, where, being at home, he writes at his ease and naturally-walking without stilts, and thinking not of himself but of his great subject? What line in all the 'Para'dise Lost' ever approaches in the least degree to such turgid inflation? There all is simple, and easy, and light, and natural— even where the theme is most lofty, and would excuse, nay, almost demand, a swelling in the diction. The truth is, that Milton wrote Prose upon a False system, and Poetry on a True. He seems to have thought that a man must never write as he would speak. Whatever he had got to say must be delivered in an out of the way fashion. Not a sentence can be found in all the prose works which is easy or natural. Not an idea meets us which a person would have expressed in the same way had he followed the simple course of telling us plainly what he thought and meant. It is an eternal labour of language, very sonorous doubtless, but very often out comes nothing, or but little, from all the heavings of the mountain. Ask you an example of the contrast which the poetry affords, so as almost to make us fancy he thought and talked in blank verse, and only composed when he sat him down to write in prose, 'numeris lege solutis ? It may be found in |