and so inimical to the author, have we not reason to lament and reprove such inconsistent hostility.

That the Latin secretary of the nation, deserved not this bitterness of censure for remaining in his office, may be thought sufficiently proved by the example of Blake.If his conduct in this article required farther justification, we might recollect with the candid bishop Newton, that the blameless Sir Mathew Hale, the favorite model of integrity, exercised under Cromwell the higher office of a judge; but the heaviest charge against Milton, is yet unanswered, the charge of lavishing the most servile adulation on the usurper.

In replying to this most plausible accusation, let me be indulged in a few remarks, that may vindicate the credit not only of a single poet, but of all Parnassus. The poetical fraternity have been often accused of being ever ready to flatter; but the general charge is in some measure, inconsistent with a knowledge of human nature. As poets, generally speaking, have more sensibility and

less prudence than other men, we should naturally expect to find them rather distinguished by an abundance, than by a want of sincerity; when they are candidly judged, they will generally be found so; a poet indeed, is as apt to applaud a hero, as a lover is to praise his mistress, and both, according to the forcible and true expression of Shakespear,

"Are of imagination all compact.”

Their descriptions are more faithful to the acuteness of their own feelings, than to the real qualities of the objects described. Paradoxical as it may sound, they are often deficient in truth, in proportion to the excess of their sincerity; the charm or the merit they celebrate, is partly the phantom of their own fancy; but they believe it real, while they praise it as a reality; and as long as their belief is sincere, it is unjust to accuse them of adulation. Milton himself gives us an excellent touchstone for the trial of praise in the following passage of his Areopagitica; "there are three principal things, without

which, all praising is but courtship, and flattery; first when that only is praised, which is solidly worth praise; next, when greatest likelihoods are brought, that such things are truly and really in those persons to whom they are ascribed; the other, when he who praises, by shewing that such his actual persuasion is of whom he writes, can demonstrate that he flatters not." If we try Milton by this, his own equitable law, we must honorably acquit him of the illiberal charge, that might almost be thought sufficiently refuted by its apparent inconsistency with his elevated spirit.

Though in the temperate judgment of posterity, Cromwell appears only a bold bad man, yet he dazzled and deceived his contemporaries, with such a strong and continued blaze of real and visionary splendour, that almost all the power and all the talents on earth

seemed eager to pay him unsolicited homage:

but I mean not to rest the vindication of Milton on the prevalence of example, which however high and dignified it might be, could never serve as a sanction for the man,

to whom the rare union of spotless in with consummate genius had given vation of character, that no rank and n ers unsupported by probity could p bestow; though all the potentates the literati of the world conspired to the usurper, we might expect Milton main like his own faithful Abdiel,

Unshaken, unseduc'd, unterrified.

a

Assuredly he was so; and in praising well he praised a personage, whose less hypocrisy assumed before him that the arch apostate of the poet co wear in the presence of Abdiel, the affectionate zeal towards man, and of attachment to God; a mask that Da has described with poetical felicity following couplet :

Dissembled zeal, ambition's old disguis
The vizard, in which fools outface the

It was more as a saint than as a that Cromwell deluded the generous lity of Milton; and, perhaps, the re

tion of his having been thus deluded, inspired the poet with his admirable apology for Uriel deceived by Satan.

For neither man nor angel can discern
Hypocrisy, the only evil, that walks
Invisible, except to God alone,

By his permissive will, thro' heav'n and earth;
And oft, tho' wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps
At wisdom's gate, and to simplicity

Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill Where no ill seems.

That sublime religious enthusiasm, which was the predominant characteristic of the poet, exposed him particularly to be duped by the prime artifice of the political impostor, who was indeed so consummate in the art of deception, that he occasionally deceived the prudent unheated Ludlow and the penetrating inflexible Bradshaw; nay, who carried habitual deception to such a length, that he is supposed, by some acute judges of human nature, to have been ultimately the dupe of his own hypocritical fervor, and to have thought himself, what he induced many to think him, the selected