that may take place from age to age in the very fibre of men's minds, and their notions of Art and Poesy. Not so much because the criticism can have the intended effect now, even though it is Dr. Johnson's, as because it suggests an additional remark or two on Lycidas in particular, and on the nature of Poetry generally, we give the heads of a reply:-(1) It is a sheer assumption that Milton offered the poem as an utterance of passion, or intense personal grief. We have indicated, as faithfully as possible, from the records, the degree of Milton's intimacy with Edward King, and of his probable affection for him, while King was yet living. The intimacy and the affection were considerable, but less perhaps than what bound Milton to other friends of his youth, of whom he has left no similar commemoration. They were certainly less than the intimacy and affection that bound him to one other friend of his youth, of whom he has left various commemorations. The bosom-friend of Milton's youth, his very friend of friends from his boyhood to the time of his Italian journey, was that Charles Diodati to whom are addressed two of his Latin Familiar Epistles, the First and Sixth of his Latin Elegies, and one Italian Sonnet, and whose death, as premature as King's, and but one year later, gave occasion to perhaps the most remarkable of all Milton's Latin poems, his Epitaphium Damonis. Only the accident that these pieces to and about Diodati are in Latin and Italian has prevented the fact of Milton's paramount affection for that young half-Italian from being generally known, and has led to the idea that the unique friend of Milton's youth was Edward King of Christ's. The death of that young scholar, so melancholy in its mode, did indeed move Milton, as it must have moved many. Here was one fine young life cut short, recklessly cut short, when thousands of coarser lives were spared, and when England and the Church of England had need that the best only should be prolonged! The recollection of the face and voice of Edward King, and of hours spent in his society, would return at the news, and would mingle with the keen imagination of the last scene, when one meek praying figure was marked on the deck of the sinking ship, resigned amid the shrieks, the mad hurry, and the gurgling waters. What more natural than that Milton should throw his feelings on the event, and the whole train of thought which it suggested, into artistic form in a memorial poem? This is precisely what Lycidas is. It is the same kind of tribute from a poet to the memory of a friend as a bust, with pedestal and bas-reliefs, would have been from a sculptor, or some thoughtful picture, of a few figures placed in a fit landscape or sea-view, would have been from a painter. Personal feeling is present; but it blends with, and passes into, the feeling of the artist thinking of his subject. (2) Johnson's criticism would abolish, by implication, all poetry whatsoever. In that crude sense of what is "natural" which his criticism begs, all poetry is unnatural. No poem, even of passion, can possibly be "natural" in the sense of being a record of the exact mental procedure consentaneous with, or appropriate to, the immediate moment of the passion. If passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions," if passion "plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius," neither does passion perform such simple acts of literary art as the construction of clear sentences, the formation of lines of metre, or the invention of rhymes. Grief, in its first act, in poets as in other people, consumes itself in "Ohs" and "Ahs," in sobs and agitated gestures, in dull numbed musings, incoherent verbal bursts, pacings of the chamber through the weary night. To poets, however, as soon as there is a lull of comparative tranquillity, and aiding perhaps to bring on that lull, there comes the use of those artifices of expression which are with them hardly artifices any longer, but the very habits of their minds. Then is produced the lay of the occasion, the song or longer poem, recording the grief indeed, and even renewing and deepening it, but weaving into the grief all the beauty of cognate story and meditation that it will bear. True, there will still be gradations of apparent closeness to the primary moment or remoteness from it, according either to the intensity of the original grief or to the poet's acquired habits of artistic working. Simplest of all, least remove of all from the original moment of feeling, and therefore most likely in some poets, and most natural in seeming to most readers, will be the direct lyric of sorrow in a few passionate stanzas. Burns's Highland Mary, and other songs of his, are examples. But there may be memorial poems, tributes to a recent or past personal grief, which shall be as true and natural, and yet be of more extensive design and more complex texture. These may contain trains of varied thought and phantasy which the original feeling has originated, and therefore may claim as its own; they may be speculative and occult, or figurative and mythological, as the habits of the poet's thinking may determine; even Mincius and Arethuse need not be absent, nor rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. Witness Shelley's Adonais to the memory of Keats. Or witness Tennyson's In Memoriam. What is that chief of memorial poems in the English tongue but an aggregation of lyrics in which, though one deep and enduring personal feeling moved to them all and pervades them all, "remote allusions and obscure opinions," beyond the learning of Johnson's time, are plentifully inwoven, snatches of story occur and recur, and all the science and metaphysics of the time become relevant to one death? Now, Milton's Lycidas is not, and does not profess to be, a poem of such personal sorrow, by many degrees, as In Memoriam. Nay, as Edward King was not a Keats, it is presumably less a poem of personal sorrow than Adonais. All the more are the traces of deliberate and conscious art which are visible in it to be regarded as consistent with the poet's actual kind and amount of feeling when he wrote it, and his true intention. There are such traces. Twice in the body of the poem, as we have seen, Milton restrains or checks himself, as having passed somewhat the strict bounds of the strain in which he had begun; and at the close there is an epilogue in his own name, characterising the poem as a "Doric lay," in which "the tender stops of various quills" had been touched, and also hinting that the artist is moving on to other themes, which will require a different treatment. (3) One established, and indeed prevalent, artifice in the poetry of Milton's day was the artifice of the pastoral form, and Johnson's criticism exhibits an utter obtuseness to the real nature, meaning, and power of this artifice. "They never drove a-field and they had no flocks to batten"! No, nor did Theocritus or Virgil ever keep sheep, or pipe on oaten flutes beneath beech-trees. Nor did the Portuguese pastoral poets do the like, nor Sannazaro and the Italians. Nor was Spenser a real Colin Clout, with Sidney, and Raleigh, and Shakespeare, and all the other poets, or other eminent Englishmen of the day, surrounding him as actual shepherds, called Astrophel, and Cuddie, and Willie, and Thomalin! What then? We know what they meant. It is one thing to hold that the pastoral form might still suit our modern times, and to wish that it were preserved; it is another to understand what the form was in the hands of those who did practise it, and to see its importance in the past history of our literature. Spenser and the other pastoralists would have smiled in scorn at the notion that the pastoral should be an exhibition of real shepherd-life, of the thoughts and manners of real shepherds. With them the pastoral form was a device,-just as metre and rhyme were devices, but in some respects of larger consequence,―for distancing themselves from the ordinary and the prosaic, and enabling them to live and move mentally in a more poetic air. It was themselves, with all their experiences and acquired ideas and feelings, that they flung into an imaginary Arcadian world, to be shepherds there, and, under the guise of that imaginary life, express their own real feelings, their most intimate experiences, and their thoughts about affairs, in monologue or dialogue. Defensible or not originally, desirable or not among ourselves, as we may think this artifice of pastoralism, this device for poets of an imaginary removal of themselves into an Arcadian land in order to think under Arcadian conditions, it is gross ignorance not to know how largely it once prevailed, and what a wealth of old poetry we owe to it. From the youth of Spenser, himself the pastoralistin-chief, on through the lives of the next generation, or from 1580 to 1640, much of the finest English poetry is in the pastoral form. During that period the word "shepherd" was an accepted synonym in England for the word "poet." They all, the finest of them all, "drove a-field" together, and "battened their flocks" in verse, though they had no flocks to batten. Milton, an admirer of Spenser, and describable as the truest of the Spenserians till he taught the world a higher than the Spenserian in the Miltonic, employed the pastoral form in his Lycidas, as he had employed it already, though less decidedly, in others of his poems. He threw the story of his acquaintance with Edward King and of the sad death of that youth by drowning, and all the train of thought about the state of England which that death suggested, into the form of a pastoral lament for that shepherd, conceived as spoken by himself as a surviving shepherd. And who would wish now that he had done otherwise? What would a simple narrative of the shipwreck, or a few stanzas of direct regret, have been in comparison with the poem we now read? It is better than any memorial bust with bas-reliefs, better than any memorial picture. It tells the facts with the minutest fidelity, but it gives them in the setting of one long mood of Milton's mind as he mused over them. And it is this setting that has made the facts immortal. If we now remember Edward King of Christ's College at all, or know that there ever was such a youth in the world, is it not owing to Milton's monody? "The diction is harsh," says Johnson in addition, "the rhymes 66 uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing."-This is worse and worse. The ear of the eighteenth century, one can see, if this is to be taken as the opinion of Johnson's contemporaries, must have been vitiated in proportion to the degradation of its notion of poesy. For fastidious beauty of diction, and musical finish of versification, Lycidas is hardly rivalled. The art of the verse is a study in itself. The lines are mostly the common Iambics of five feet, but every now and then there is an exquisitely managed variation of a short line of three Iambi. Then the interlinking and intertwining of the rhymes, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in threes, or even fives, and at all varieties of intervals, from that of the contiguous couplet to that of an unobserved chime or stanza of some length, are positive perfection. Occasionally, too, in the poem there is a line that does not rhyme; and in every such case, though the rhyme is never missed by the reader's ear, in so much music is the line embedded, yet a delicate artistic reason may be detected or fancied for its formal absence. The first line of all is one instance. We shall leave the reader to find out the others. SONNETS AND KINDRED PIECES. In one well-known sonnet of Wordsworth's there is the very essence of the history of the Sonnet down to Milton's time:— "Scorn not the Sonnet: Critic, you have frowned, His visionary brow; a glow-worm lamp, It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew Milton, however, is notable in the succession of chief sonnet-writers, |