Sir Richard Steele, in a dedication of the comedy of the Drummer, to Mr. Congreve, gave the first insight into that business.  He says, in a style of anger and resentment:  “If that gentleman (Mr. Tickell) thinks himself injured, I will allow I have wronged him upon this issue, that, if the reputed translator of the first book of Homer shall please to give us another book, there shall appear another good judge in poetry, besides Mr. Alexander Pope, who shall like it.”  The authority of Steele outweighs all opinions, founded on vain conjecture, and, indeed, seems to be decisive, since we do not find that Tickell, though warmly pressed, thought proper to vindicate himself.

But the grand proof of Johnson’s malignity, is the manner in which he has treated the character and conduct of Milton.  To enforce this charge has wearied sophistry, and exhausted the invention of a party.  What they cannot deny, they palliate; what they cannot prove, they say is probable.  But why all this rage against Dr. Johnson?  Addison, before him, had said of Milton: 

  “Oh! had the poet ne’er profan’d his pen,
  To varnish o’er the guilt of faithless men!”

And had not Johnson an equal right to avow his sentiments?  Do his enemies claim a privilege to abuse whatever is valuable to Englishmen, either in church or state? and must the liberty of unlicensed printing be denied to the friends of the British constitution?

It is unnecessary to pursue the argument through all its artifices, since, dismantled of ornament and seducing language, the plain truth may be stated in a narrow compass.  Johnson knew that Milton was a republican:  he says, “an acrimonious and surly republican, for which it is not known that he gave any better reason than, that a popular government was the most frugal; for the trappings of a monarchy would set up an ordinary commonwealth.”  Johnson knew that Milton talked aloud “of the danger of readmitting kingship in this nation;” and when Milton adds, “that a commonwealth was commended, or rather enjoined, by our Saviour himself, to all christians, not without a remarkable disallowance, and the brand of gentilism upon kingship,” Johnson thought him no better than a wild enthusiast.  He knew, as well as Milton, “that the happiness of a nation must needs be firmest and certainest in a full and free council of their own electing, where no single person, but reason only, sways;” but the example of all the republicks, recorded in the annals of mankind, gave him no room to hope, that reason only would be heard.  He knew, that the republican form of government, having little or no complication, and no consonance of parts, by a nice mechanism forming a regular whole, was too simple to be beautiful, even in theory.  In practice it, perhaps, never existed.  In its most flourishing state, at Athens, Rome, and Carthage, it was a constant scene of tumult and commotion.  From the mischiefs of a wild democracy, the progress