m m111 . -, I ' ' . '.. b " ' -'" ^ ' ''., ..- .- , - ' ' I . ' > ^H ; m. am . :'.: ' ' i _ : ' ' '':;'' NY PUB NY PUBLIC LIBRARY THE BRANCH LIBRARIES L1 821 Milton 3 3333 13340 9256 Milton, John Milton: poetry & prose; 593387 The New\brk cn Public Library O Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations CO The Branch Libraries MM MID-MANHATTAN LIBRARY Literature & Language Dept. LL 455 Fifth Avenue New York, N.Y. 10016 Books and non-print media may be returned to any branch of The New York Public Library. Music scores, orchestral sets and certain materials must be returned to branch from which borrowed. All materials must be returned by the last date stamped on the card. Fines are charged for overdue items. Form #0692 ( iii ! F : i & !. .-.- airrmrm t / Wo a fI inj f(/ ,v//' / /',//..- . i //: MILTON Poetry & Prose With Essays by JOHNSON HAZLITT MACAULAY With an Introduction by A. M. D. HUGHES and Notes by various scholars OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS The notes in this edition are based mainly on the notes in the Clarendon Press editions of Johnson's Z.z/ of Milton by C. H. Firth, Macaulay's Essay on Milton by P. T. Cres- well, Milton's Poems by R. C. Browne, revised by Henry Bradley, and Milton's Areopagitica by J. W. Hales. FIRST EDITION IQ2O REPRINTED IQ22, IQ25, 1930, PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD BY CHARLES BATEY, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY CONTENTS PAGE Introduction v From Johnson's Life of Milton ..... i From Hazlitt's Lecture on Shakespeare and Milton. 27 From Macaulay's Essay on Milton .... 43 On the Morning of Christ's Nativity . ... 63 On Shakespear . .... 72 Sonnet : On his being arrived to the age of 23 . 72 Sonnet : To the Nightingale . 73 At a Solemn Music 73 Song on May Morning 74 L'Allegro 75 II Penseroso 79 From Comus ........ 86 Lycidas ......... 103 Sonnet : When the assault was intended to the City 109 Sonnet : To the Lord General Cromwell . 109 Sonnet : On his Blindness . no Sonnet : On the late massacre in Piedmont . .no From Paradise Lost. .113 From Paradise Regained . .... 161 From Samson Agonistes 166 From Areopagitica ... ... 174 From The Reason of Church-Government . 183 Notes ......... 189 INTRODUCTION THE process of assaying and valuing the works of Milton has been long and gradual, and not without a fluctuation in the estimate, for Milton is dominated, both as an artist and as a thinker, by the fashion of his age, and is also solitary and remote. His earlier writings are characteristic of the period when English poetry, after the great Elizabethan flood, was silting up in learned fancy and curious wit, but here or there still ran with a lively current. The Hymn on the Nativity is 'metaphysical* poetry in the style of Donne and Cowley, in which, as Johnson has judicially ' if conceits were phrased it, the were far-fetched, they sometimes worth the carriage '. UAllegro and // Penseroso, recovering, as they do, some of the supreme felicities of Elizabethan verse, the ease and magic of words and the serenity of heart, are among the things that are never stale or strange. But in Comus and Lycidas the poet has taken up the masque and the pastoral from the fashion of his day, each of them a form of poetry which only a true poet could redeem from artifice, and then only if the reader should connive. Down to almost the end of this period he is apparently at home in the Merry England of his youth. His theme is the beauty of holiness, and he takes his ' 'pleasure unreproved in 'pomp and feast and revelry* and in the comeliness of Anglican worship. But Lycidas suddenly gives voice to the spirit which parted him from the Church, plunged him into twenty years of political contention, and suspended his lifelong purpose of leaving a work to posterity 'so written that they should not vi INTRODUCTION willingly let it die '. He returned to poetry a lonely in an evil time from his prophet ; and resuming Comus great theme of temptation, sang of the Fall in Eden as the kernel of man's history, and of man's history as the critical encounter in a war of Heaven and Hell a subject beyond example high, and bare, and difficult. If the earlier poems call for some compliance from the reader in respect of the style, so do the later in respect of the spirit and the thought. In all the three great poems of his old age there is a temper which, whether it breathes in the grand style of Paradise Lost or the bloomless seventy of Paradise Regained, whether triumphant or stoically assured, is always self-centred, and often imperious and a little harsh. Three important factors of the long debate are repre- sented by the essays in this book. The first is a famous document of the academic criticism of the eighteenth century. The second is in the manner of the imaginative submission which restored so much of our literary heritage in the romantic era. The third was the earliest and best of the critical estimates written for the Reviews. Some- what deficient, as all Macaulay's work is, in analytic power, it abounded in good observations, and its fervid panegyric proclaimed his political sympathy with Milton's creed. In Johnson's time the spirit of man looked back to the literature of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with the feeling of maturity for the adventures of youth. The vernal hours of the Renaissance were gone, when the language, much more pliant than it afterwards became, and richer from day to day, flowed freely in new music and ' ' rhythm, when imagination ran to and fro and nested in all manner of lore and myth, and the half of life was pageant and play. The faculty of make-believe and the ear for numbers weakened together, and the mythology of Greece and Rome, to Milton a living dialect of the heart, was now only a cold embellishment. It was Johnson's INTRODUCTION vii merit that in these circumstances he stood for honesty. He was far from niggardly in his admiration. His force of mind and his sensibility together made his criticism, not indeed an accomplice of the original creation, as the best kind is, but on its own plane luminous and liberal. It is eminently a judicial criticism, a methodized endeavour to balance impartially the merits and demerits of its subject. But his strength, and also his weakness, are most con- ' spicuous in the attack. As Landor has remarked, he is seldom erroneous in his censures, but not sufficiently moved to admiration by what is highest and purest in poetry '. The pastoral was no longer a medium of real emotion he would have done with it. ; The masque was a spurious form, neither music nor architecture nor drama, but a mixture of the three. As printed in a book, however, it was drama; and he would test it accordingly. Hardly less spurious was the literary play of the type of Samson as it to Agonistes ; that, too, must be taken purported be. In all this he took his stand on sincerity and truth, and on the axiom that matter must be one with form. That in ' Comus the is too luxuriant for language dialogue ', and the at times instructive is a true dialogue 'tediously , observation, and Macaulay's rejoinder, that, being dramatic ' only in semblance, the speeches must be read as magnifi- cent is its truth. soliloquies ', simply an avowal of Simi- larly, the complaint that the middle part ofSamson Agonistes ' ' neither hastens nor retards the catastrophe is no more or less than Macaulay's indictment in a slightly different form. Johnson's only fault in these instances is in not displaying the redeeming and glorifying beauty of either poem in due degree. But in the strictures on Lycidas his insensitiveness has to for amounted positive disablement ; here all depends on the ear of the reader, on the fascination of the literary models, and on a poetic piety for the legends of the ancient world. What was once the most penetrative viii INTRODUCTION spell in the classical literatures had so far palled with time that to Johnson, scholar as he was, the poets of the Re- naissance had erred in mingling the Christian story and the pagan myths. And so far had the ear for the music of verse declined upon an emphatic rhyming and 'the stated recur- rence of settled numbers' that Johnson may be said to have almost forfeited a whole dimension of poetic sense. Under such disabilities it was natural to see in Lycidas only another pastoral, and to argue that a grief embodied in so much fiction was itself fictitious. The logical mean- ing of a poem may be only the least of its elements, and it is the music of this noble elegy that expresses most inti- mately its quiet and tender memories though not such passion as throbs fierce and sudden in the lines on the ' ' ' blind mouths and the Wolf with privy paw '. The same critical deficiency is at the root of his strange judgement that of Milton's sonnets the best are only not bad. Partly, as we may infer, he thought the sonnet too small for its matter, but mainly, as he tells us, it foiled his craving for simple metre and frequent rhyme. Milton is one of the poets who have set up great differ- ences between the learned and the simple among their readers, between the men of letters and the rest. This is especially true of Paradise Regained.