Dear as the sage, renown'd for moral truth, His pupil, who disdain'd the world he won! In young Achilles' eyes, as he in mine: First led by him, thro' sweet Aonian shade, Each sacred haunt of Pindus I survey'd; Explor'd the fountain, and the Muse my guide, Thrice steep'd my lips in the Castalian tide. And again, in expressing his regret upon the length of their separation : Nec dum ejus licuit mihi lumina pascere vultu, Aut linguæ dulces aure bibisse sonos. Nor yet his friendly features feast my sight, As the tenderness of the young poet is admirably displayed in the beginning of this Elegy, his more acknowledged characteristic, religious fortitude, is not less admirable in the close of it. At tu sume animos, nec spes cadat anxia curis, At nullis vel inerme latus violabitur armis, Et tu (quod superest miseris) sperare memento, But thou, take courage, strive against despair, The reader, inclined to sympathise in the joys of Milton, will be gratified in being. VOL. I. informed, that preceptor, whose exile and poverty he pathetically lamented, and whose prosperous return he predicted, was in a few years restored to his country, and became Master of Jesus College, in Cambridge. As the year in which he quitted England (1625) corresponds with the fifteenth year of his pupil's age, it is probable that Milton was placed, at that time, under the care of Mr. Gill and his son; the former, chief master of St. Paul's school, the latter, his assistant, and afterwards his successor. It is remarkable, that Milton, who has been so uncandidly represented as an uncontroulable spirit, and a spurner of all just authority, seems to have contracted a tender attachment to more than one disciplinarian concerned in his education. He is said to have been the favorite scholar of the younger Gill; and he has left traces of their friendship in three Latin epistles, that express the highest esteem for the literary character and poetical talents of his instructor. On the 12th of February, 1624, he was entered, not as a sizer, which some of his biographers have erroneously asserted, but as a pensioner of Christ's College, in Cambridge. "At this time," says Doctor Johnson, "he was eminently skilled in the Latin 66 tongue, and he himself, by annexing the "dates to his first compositions, a boast of "which the learned Politian had given him "an example, seems to commend the earli"ness of his own proficiency to the notice of posterity; but the products of his vernal 66 fertility have been surpassed by many, and particularly by his contemporary, Cowley. "Of the powers of the mind it is difficult to "form an estimate; many have excelled "Milton in their first essays, who never rose "to works like Paradise Lost." This is the first of many remarks, replete with detraction, in which an illustrious author has indulged his spleen against Milton, in a life of the poet, where an illsubdued propensity to censure is ever combating with a necessity to commend. The partisans of the powerful critic, from a natural partiality to their departed master, affect to consider his malignity as existing only in the prejudices of those who endeavour to counteract his injustice. A biographer of Milton ought therefore to regard it as his indispensable duty to shew how far this malignity is diffused through a long series of observations, which affect the reputation both of the poet and the man; a and the man; a duty that must be painful in proportion to the sincerity of our esteem for literary excellence; since different as they were in their principles, their manners, and their writings, both the poet and his critical biographer are assuredly entitled to the praise of exalted genius. Perhaps in the republic of letters there never existed two writers more deservedly distinguished, not only for the energy of their mental faculties, but for a generous and devout desire to benefit mankind by their exertion. Yet it must be lamented, and by the lovers of Milton in particular, that a moralist, who has given us, in the Rambler, such sublime lessons for the discipline of the heart and mind, should be unable to preserve his own from that acrimonious spirit of detraction which led him to depreciate, to the ut |