Or Neptune's ire, or Juno's, that so long
Perplex'd the Greek, and Cytherea's son.

This subject for heroic song

Pleas'd me long choosing, and beginning late; Not sedulous by nature to indite

Wars, hitherto the only argument

Heroic deem'd, chief mast'ry to dissect,

With long and tedious havoc, fabled knights,
In battles feign'd; the better fortitude
Of patience and heroic martyrdom
Unsung; or to describe races and games,
Or tilting furniture, imblazon'd shields,
Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds,
Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights
At joust and torneament; then marshal'd feast
Serv'd up in hall with sewers and seneschals;
The skill of artifice or office mean,

Not that which justly gives heroic name
To person or to poem: me of these
Nor skill'd, nor studious, higher argument
Remains, sufficient of itself to raise

That name.

Milton seems to have given a purer signification than we commonly give to the word hero, and to have thought it might be assigned to any person eminent and attrac

tive enough to form a principal figure in a great picture. In truth, when we recollect the etymology which a philosopher and a saint have left us of the term, we cannot admire the propriety of devoting it to illustrious homicides. Plato derives the Greek word from others, that imply either eloquence or love; and St. Augustine, from the Grecian name of Juno, or the air, because original heroes were pure departed spirits, supposed to reside in that element. In Milton's idea, the ancient heroes of epic poetry seem to have too much resembled the modern great man, according to the delineation of that character in Fielding's exquisite history of Jonathan Wild the Great. Much as the English poet delighted in the poetry of Homer, he appears to have thought like an American writer of the present age, whose fervent passion for the Muses, is only inferior to his philanthropy, that the Grecian bard, though celebrated as the prince of moralists by Horace, and esteemed a teacher of virtue by St. Basil, has too great a tendency to nourish that sanguinary madness in man

kind, which has continually made the earth a theatre of carnage. I am afraid that some poets and historians may have been a little accessary to the innumerable massacres, with which men, ambitious of obtaining the title of hero, have desolated the world; and it is certain, that a severe judge of Homer may with some plausibility, apply to him the reproach that his Agamemnon utters to Achilles :

Αιει γαρ τοι ερις τε φιλκ, πολεμοι τε μαχαι το

"For all thy pleasure is in strife and blood."

·Yet a lover of the Grecian bard may observe in his defence, that in assigning these words to the leader of his host, he shews the pacific propriety of his own sentiments; and that, however his verses may have instigated an Alexander to carnage, or prompted the calamitous frequency of war, even this pagan poet, so famous as the describer of battles, detested the objects of his description.

But whatever may be thought of the heathen bard, Milton, to whom a purer re

ligion had given greater purity, and I think greater force of imagination, Milton from a long survey of human nature, had contracted such an abhorrence for the atrocious absurdity of ordinary war, that his feelings in this point, seem to have influenced his epic fancy. He appears to have relinquished common heroes, that he might not cherish the too common characteristic of man-a sanguinary spirit. He aspired to delight the imagination, like Homer, and to produce, at the same time, a much happier effect on the mind. Has he succeeded in this glorious idea? Assuredly he has :-to please is the end of poetry. Homer pleases perhaps more universally than Milton; but the pleasure that the English poet excites, is more exquisite in its nature, and superior in its effect. An eminent painter of France used to say that in reading Homer, he felt his nerves dilated, and he seemed to encrease in stature. Such an ideal effect as Homer, in this example, produced on the body, Milton produces in the spirit. To a reader who thoroughly relishes the two poems on Paradise,

his heart appears to be purified, in proportion to the pleasure he derives from the poet, and his mind to become angelic. Such a taste for Milton is rare, and the reason why it is so, is this to form it completely, a reader must possess, in some degree, what was superlatively possessed by the poet, a mixture of two different species of enthusiasm, the poetical and the religious. To relish Homer, it is sufficient to have a passion for excellent verse; but the reader of Milton, who is only a lover of the Muses, loses half, and certainly the best half, of that transcendent delight which the poems of this divine enthusiast are capable of imparting. A devotional taste is as requisite for the full enjoyment of Milton as a taste for poetry; and this remark will sufficiently explain the inconsistency so striking in the sentiments of many distinguished writers, who have repeatedly spoken on the great English poet -particularly that inconsistency, which I partly promised to explain in the judgments of Dryden and Voltaire. These very different men had both a passion for verse,.