presentations of cold and callous austerity. But Mr. Warton had fallen into a mistake, which has betrayed other well-disposed minds into an unreasonable abhorrence of Milton's prose; I mean the mistake of regarding it as having a tendency to subvert our existing government. Can any man justly think it has such a tendency, who recollects that no government, similar to that which the Revolution established for England, existed when Milton wrote? His impassioned yet disinterested ardour for reformation was excited by those gross abuses of power, which that new settlement of the state very happily corrected..

Your learned and good-natured brother, my dear friend, was not the only man of learning and good-nature, who indulged a prejudice, that to us appears very extravagant, to give it the gentlest appellation. A literary Paladine (if I may borrow from romance a title of distinction to honor a very powerful historian) even Gibbon himself, whom we both admired and loved for his literary and for his social accomplishments, surpassed, I think, on this topic, the severity of Mr. Warton,

passionately admired, and to whom he bore, I think, in many points, a very striking resemblance. Perhaps they both possessed too large a portion of fancy and enthusiasm to make good practical statesmen; the visionaries of public virtue have seldom succeeded in the management of dominion, and in politics it has long been a prevailing creed to believe, that government is like gold, and must not be fashioned for extensive use without the alloy of corruption. But I mean not to burthen you, my lively friend, with political reflections, or with a long dissertation on the great mass of Milton's prose ; you whose studies are so various and extensive, are sufficiently familiar with those singular compositions; and I am not a little gratified in the assurance that think as I do, both of their blemishes and their beauties, and approve the use that I have made of them in my endeavours to elucidate the life and character of their author. Much as we respected the classical erudition and the taste of your lamented brother, I am confident that we can neither of us subscribe to the censure he has passed on the Latin style of Milton, who, to my apprehension, is

you

often most admirably eloquent in that language, and particularly so in the passage I have cited from his character of Bradshaw; a character in which I have known very acrimonious enemies to the name of the man commended, very candidly acknowledge the eloquence of the eulogist. Some rigorous idolaters of the unhappy race of Stuart may yet censure me even for this dispassionate revival of such a character; but you, my liberal friend to the freedom of literary discussion, you will suggest to me, that the minds of our countrymen in general aspire to Roman magnanimity, in rendering justice to great qualities in men, who were occasionally the objects of public detestation, and you join with me in admiring that example of such magnanimity, to which I particularly allude. Nothing is more honourable to ancient Rome, than her generosity in allowing the statue of Hannibal to be raised and admired within the walls of the very city, which it was the ambition of his life to distress and destroy.

In emulation of that spirit, which delights to honor the excellencies of an illustrious antagonist, ·I have endeavoured to preserve in my own mind,

and to express on every proper occasion, my unshaken regard for the rare faculties and virtues of a late biographer, whom it has been my lot to encounter continually as a very bitter, and sometimes I think, an insidious enemy to the great poet,whose memory I have fervently wished to rescue from indignity and detraction. The asperity of Johnson towards Milton has often struck the fond admirers of the poet in various points of view; in one moment it excites laughter, in another indignation; now it reminds us of the weapon of Goliah as described by Cowley;

"A sword so great, that it was only fit

To cut off his great head that came with it;

now it prompts us to exclaim, in the words of an angry Roman;

"Nec bellua tetrior ulla est

Quam servi rabies in libera collà furentis."

I have felt, I confess, these different emotions of resentment in perusing the various sarcasms of the austere critic against the object of my poeticul idolatry, but I have tried, and I hope with some

success, to correct the animosity they must naturally excite, by turning to the more temperate works of that very copious and admirable writer, particu·larly to his exquisite paper in the Rambler (No. 54) on the deaths and asperity of literary men. It is hardly possible, I think, to read the paper I have mentioned without losing, for some time at least, all sensations of displeasure towards the eloquent, the tender moralist, and reflecting, with a sort of friendly satisfaction, that as long as the language of England exists, the name of Johnson will remain and deserve to remain

Magnum et memorabile nomen.

As long as eloquence and morality are objects of public regard, we must revere that great mental physician, who has given to us all, infirm mortals as the best of us are, such admirable prescriptions for the regimen of mind, and we should rather speak in sorrow than in anger, when we are forced to recollect, that, like other physicians, however able and perfect in theory, he failed to correct the infirmity of his own morbid spirit, You, my dear War