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DEDICATION

то THE

REV. JOSEPH WARTON, D. D. &c.

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MY PLEASANT AND RESPECTABLE FRIEND!

IN prefixing your name to this volume, I feel and con

fefs the double influence of an affectionate and of an ambitious defire to honour you and myself. Our loft and lamented Friend GIBBON has told us, I think very truly, in dedicating a juvenile work to his Father, that there are but two kinds of Dedications, which can do honour either to the Patron or the Author-the first arising from literary esteem, the second from perfonal affection. If either of these two characteristics may be fufficient to give propriety to a Dedication, I have little to apprehend for the prefent, which has certainly the advantage of uniting the

two.

The kind and friendly manner in which you commended the first edition of this Life might alone have induced me to infcribe a more ample copy of it to that li

terary

terary veteran, whose applause is so juftly dear to me. I have additional inducements in recollecting your animated and enlightened regard for the glory of MILTON. It is pleasing to address a sympathetic friend on a subject that interests the fancy and the heart. I remember, with peculiar gratification, the liberality and franknefs, with which you lamented to me the extreme feverity of the late Mr. Warton, in defcribing the controverfial writings of Milton. I honour the rare integrity of your mind, my candid friend, which took the part of injured genius and probity against the prejudices of a brother, eminent as a scholar, and entitled alfo, in many points of view, to your love and admiration. I fympathize with you moft cordially in regretting the severity to which I allude, fo little to be expected from the general temper of the critic, and from that affectionate fpirit, with which he had vindicated the poetry of Milton from the misreprefentations of cold and callous austerity. But Mr. Warton had fallen into a mistake, which has betrayed other welldifpofed minds into an unreasonable abhorrence of Milton's profe; I mean the mistake of regarding it as having a tendency to fubvert our exifting government. Can any man justly think it has fuch a tendency, who recollects that no government, fimilar to that which the Revolution established for England, existed when Milton wrote. His impaffioned yet difinterested ardour for reformation was

excited

excited by those gross abuses of power, which that new fettlement of the ftate 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 honour a very powerful historian) even Gibbon himself, whom we both admired and loved for his literary and for his focial accomplishments, furpaffed, I think, on this topic, the severity of Mr. Warton, and held it hardly compatible with the duty of a good citizen to re-publish, in the present times, the profe of Milton, as he apprehended it might be productive of public evil. For my own part, although I fincerely refpected the highly culti vated mind that harboured this apprehenfion, yet the apprehension itself appeared to me somewhat fimilar to the fear of Falstaff, when he says, "I am afraid of this

gunpowder Percy, though he be dead." As the profe of Milton had a reference to the distracted period in which it arose, its arguments, if they could by any means be pointed against our exifting government, are surely as incapable of inflicting a wound, as completely dead for all the purposes of hoftility, as the noble Percy is reprefented, when he excites the ludicrous terror of Sir John: but while I prefume to defcribe the profe of Milton as

inanimate

inanimate in one point of view, let me have the justice to add, that it frequently breathes fo warm a fpirit of genuine eloquence and philanthropy, that I am perfuaded the prophecy of its great author concerning it will be gradually accomplished; its defects and its merits will be more temperately and justly estimated in a future than age they have hitherto been. The prejudices fo recently entertained againft it, by the two eminent writers I have mentioned, were entertained at a period when a very extraordinary panic poffeffed and overclouded many of the most elevated and enlightened minds of this kingdom— a period when a retired ftudent could hardly amuse himfelf with perufing the nervous republican writers of the last century, without being fufpected of framing deadly machinations against the monarchs of the present day; and when the principles of a Jacobin were very blindly imputed to a truly English writer of acknowledged genius, and of the pureft reputation, who is, perhaps, of all men living, the most perfectly blameless in his sentiments of government, morality, and religion. But, happily for the credit of our national understanding, and our national courage, the panic to which I allude has speedily passed away, and a man of letters may now, I prefume, as fafely and irreproachably perufe or reprint the great republican writers of England, as he might translate or elucidate the political vifions of Plato, a writer whom Milton paffionately admired,

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