Henry Hart Milman Biography

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Dictionary of Literary Biography on Henry Hart Milman

Henry Hart Milman, Dean of St. Paul's, was the most distinguished ecclesiastical historian of his day. He had a fine critical mind and keen historical insight, but according to his longtime friend John Gibson Lockhart, eminent editor of the Quarterly Review, Milman "ought never to have been a Poet." Most readers since have concurred; yet in his early career Milman was regarded as showing much promise, and as recently as 1962, Frederick May wrote of him as an unjustly neglected poet. No less a luminary than Sir Walter Scott wrote to Milman of The Fall of Jerusalem (1820) that he had "rarely seen a work so powerful and at the same time so polished, so full of purity and loftiness of sentiment, and so free from affectation, so forcibly addressed to the passions yet at the same time so delicate and so moral." But George Gordon, Lord Byron, who in Canto II of Don Juan (1819-1823) called Milman an "artificial hard/Labourer" in the "vineyard" of poetry, "That ox of verse, who ploughs for every line," and Percy Bysshe Shelley, for whom Milman's only stage play was "miserable trash," were among those contemporaries who found the clergyman's verse less appealing.

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