66

says

to his seamen, "It is our business to hinder foreigners from fooling us," by which, he justified his continuance in his post under Cromwell, is singularly applicable to Milton who, as a servant, engaged by the state to conduct, in Latin, its foreign correspondence might think himself as strongly bound in duty and honor, as the justly applauded admiral, "to hinder his country from being fooled by foreigners.". "But Milton," his uncandid biographer, " continuing to exercise his office under a manifest usurpation, betrayed to his power, that liberty which he had defended." Was the usurpation 'more manifest to Milton, than to Blake? Or is it a deeper crime against liberty to write the Latin dispatches, than to fight the naval battles of a nation under the controul of an usurper? Assuredly not: nor had either Blake or Milton, the least intention of betraying that liberty, which was equally the darling idol of their elevated and congenial spirits; but in finding the learned and eloquent biographer of these two im-. mortal worthies so friendly to the admiral.

and so inimical to the author, have we not reason to lament and reprove such inconsistent hostility.

That the Latin secretary of the nation, deserved not this bitterness of censure for remaining in his office, may be thought sufficiently proved by the example of Blake.If his conduct in this article required farther justification, we might recollect with the candid bishop Newton, that the blameless Sir Mathew Hale, the favorite model of integrity, exercised under Cromwell the higher office of a judge; but the heaviest charge against Milton, is yet unanswered, the charge of lavishing the most servile adulation on the usurper.

In replying to this most plausible accusation, let me be indulged in a few remarks, that may vindicate the credit not only of a single poet, but of all Parnassus. The po

etical fraternity have been often accused of being ever ready to flatter; but the general charge is in some measure, inconsistent with a knowledge of human nature. As poets, generally speaking, have more sensibility and

less prudence than other men, we should naturally expect to find them rather distinguished by an abundance, than by a want of sincerity; when they are candidly judged, they will generally be found so; a poet indeed, is as apt to applaud a hero, as a lover is to praise his mistress, and both, according to the forcible and true expression of Shakespear,

"Are of imagination all compact."

Their descriptions are more faithful to the acuteness of their own feelings, than to the real qualities of the objects described. Paradoxical as it may sound, they are often deficient in truth, in proportion to the excess of their sincerity; the charm or the merit they celebrate, is partly the phantom of their own fancy; but they believe it real, while they praise it as a reality; and as long as their belief is sincere, it is unjust to accuse them of adulation. Milton himself gives us an excellent touchstone for the trial of praise in the following passage of his Areopagitica; "there are three principal things, without

which, all praising is but courtship, and flattery; first when that only is praised, which is solidly worth praise; next, when greatest likelihoods are brought, that such things are truly and really in those persons to whom they are ascribed; the other, when he who praises, by shewing that such his actual persuasion is of whom he writes, can demonstrate that he flatters not." If we try Milton by this, his own equitable law, we must honorably acquit him of the illiberal charge, that might almost be thought sufficiently refuted by its apparent inconsistency with his elevated spirit.

Though in the temperate judgment of posterity, Cromwell appears only a bold bad man, yet he dazzled and deceived his contemporaries, with such a strong and continued blaze of real and visionary splendour, that almost all the power and all the talents on earth seemed eager to pay him unsolicited homage: but I mean not to rest the vindication of Milton on the prevalence of example, which however high and dignified it might be, could never serve as a sanction for the man,

to whom the rare union of spotless integrity with consummate genius had given an elevation of character, that no rank and no pow, ers unsupported by probity could possibly bestow; though all the potentates and all the literati of the world conspired to flatter the usurper, we might expect Milton to remain like his own faithful Abdiel,

Unshaken, unseduc'd, unterrified.

Assuredly he was so; and in praising Cromwell he praised a personage, whose matchless hypocrisy assumed before him a mask that the arch apostate of the poet could not wear in the presence of Abdiel, the mask of affectionate zeal towards man, and of devout attachment to God; a mask that Davenant has described with poetical felicity in the following couplet :

Dissembled zeal, ambition's old disguise,

The vizard, in which fools outface the wise.

It was more as a saint than as an hero, that Cromwell deluded the generous credulity of Milton; and, perhaps, the recollec