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dise Lost, 1. 32, which is addressed by satan to the sun Were it material, I believe I could produce other passages, which more plainly appear to have been originally intended for the scene: but whatever truth there may be in this report, it is certain, that he did not begin to mould his subject, in the form which it bears now, before he had concluded his controversy with Salmasius, and More, when he had wholly lost the use of his eyes, and was forced to employ, in the office of an amanuensis, any friend who accidentally paid him a visit. Yet under all these discouragements, and various interruptions, in the year 1669, he published his Paradise Lost, the noblest poem (next to those of Homer and Virgil) that ever the wit of man produced in any age or nation. Need I mention any other evidence of its inestimable worth, than that the finest geniuses who have succeeded him, have ever esteemed it a merit, to relish and illustrate its beauties?

And now, perhaps, it may pass for a fiction, what with great veracity I affirm to be fact, that Milton, after having with much difficulty prevailed to have this divine poem licensed for the press, could sell the copy for no more than fifteen pounds: the payinent of which valuable consideration depended upon the sale of three numerous impressions. So unreasonably may personal prejudice affect the most excellent performances !

About two years after, he published Paradise Regained; but Oh, what a falling off was there!—of which I will say no more, than that there is scarcely a more remarkable instance of the frailty of human reason than our author gave, in preferring this poem to Paradise Lost.

And thus having attended him to the sixty-sixth year of his age, as closely as such imperfect lights as men of letters and retirement usually leave to guide our inquiry would allow, it now only remains to be recorded, that, in the year 1674, the gout put a period to his life, at Bunhill, near London; from whence his body was conveyed to St. Giles' church, by Cripplegate, where it lies interred in the chancel, and a neat monument has lately been erected to perpetuate his memory.

In his youth he is said to have been extremely handsome; the colour of his hair was a light brown, the symmetry of his features exact, enlivened with an agreeable air, and a beautiful mixture of fair and ruddy. His stature, (as we find it measured by himself) did not exceed the middle size, neither too lean nor corpulent; his limbs well proportioned, nervous and active, serviceable in all re spects to his exercising the sword, in which he much delighted and wanted neither skill nor courage to resent an affront from men of the most athletic constitutions. In his diet he was abstemious not delicate in the choice of his dishes; and strong liquors of all kinds were his aversion. His deportment was erect, open, affable; his conversation easy, cheerful, instructive; his wit on all occasions at command, facetious, grave, or satirical, as the subject required. His judgment, when disengaged from religious and political speculations, was just and penetrating, his apprehension quick, his me

mory tenacious of what he read, his reading only not so extensive as his genius, for that was universal. And having treasured up such immense store of science, perhaps the faculties of his soul grew more vigorous after he was deprived of sight: and his imagination, (naturally sublime and enlarged by reading romances, of which he was much enamoured in his youth,) when it was wholly abstracted from material objects, was more at liberty to make suc amazing excursions into the ideal world, when in composing hi divine work he was tempted to range,

Beyond the visible diurnal sphere.

With so many accomplishments, not to have had some faults and nisfortunes to be laid in the balance, with the fame and felicity of writing Paradise Lost, would have been too great a portion for Aumanity.

ELIJAH FENTON.

THE VERSE

THE measure is English heroic verse without rhyme, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; rhyme being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age, to set off wretched matter, and lame metre; graced, indeed, since, by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hinderance, and constraint, to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have expressed them. Not without cause, therefore, some, both Italian and Spanish poets, of prime note, have rejected rhyme, both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients, both in poetry and all good oratory. This neglect then of rhyme so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it is rather to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming.

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