* * * * *

Milton’s character is one of the things which “securus judicat orbis terrarum.”  On one point only there seems to us, as we have frequently implied, to be room for modification.  In the popular conception of Milton the poet and the man are imperfectly combined.  We allow his greatness as a poet, but deny him the poetical temperament which alone could have enabled him to attain it.  He is looked upon as a great, good, reverend, austere, not very amiable, and not very sensitive man.  The author and the book are thus set at variance, and the attempt to conceive the character as a whole results in confusion and inconsistency.  To us, on the contrary, Milton, with all his strength of will and regularity of life, seems as perfect a representative as any of his compeers of the sensitiveness and impulsive passion of the poetical temperament.  We appeal to his remarkable dependence upon external prompting for his compositions; to the rapidity of his work under excitement, and his long intervals of unproductiveness; to the heat and fury of his polemics; to the simplicity with which, fortunately for us, he inscribes small particulars of his own life side by side with weightiest utterances on Church and State; to the amazing precipitancy of his marriage and its rupture; to his sudden pliability upon appeal to his generosity; to his romantic self-sacrifice when his country demanded his eyes from him; above all, to his splendid ideals of regenerated human life, such as poets alone either conceive or realize.  To overlook all this is to affirm that Milton wrote great poetry without being truly a poet.  One more remark may be added, though not required by thinking readers.  We must beware of confounding the essential with the accidental Milton—­the pure vital spirit with the casual vesture of the creeds and circumstances of the era in which it became clothed with mortality:—­

         “They are still immortal
          Who, through birth’s orient portal
    And death’s dark chasm hurrying to and fro,
          Clothe their unceasing flight
          In the brief dust and light
    Gathered around their chariots as they go. 
          New shapes they still may weave,
          New gods, new laws, receive.”

If we knew for certain which of the many causes that have enlisted noble minds in our age would array Milton’s spirit “in brief dust and light,” supposing it returned to earth in this nineteenth century, we should know which was the noblest of them all, but we should be as far as ever from knowing a final and stereotyped Milton.

THE END.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  A famous Presbyterian tract of the day, so called from the combined initials of the authors, one of whom was Milton’s old instructor, Thomas Young.  The “Remonstrant” to whom Milton replied was Bishop Hall.]