V. "If you had read my writings, you would have seen that I have proved superstition to be the greatest enemy to Kings."

C. "I have read and studied your writings repeatedly, and never more assiduously than when I differed from you in opinion. Your predominant passion is love for the human race. Est ubi peccas. It makes you blind. Love mankind, but love them as they are. They are not susceptible of the benefit you intend for them. If they followed your advice, they would only become unhappy and wicked. Leave them, therefore, the monster that devours them. It is dear to them. I never laughed more than when I read that Don Quixotte found himself in the greatest perplexity how he should defend himself against the galley-slaves, whom, out of generosity, he had liberated."

V. "Do you feel yourself free at Venice?"

C. "As free as we can be under an aristocratic government. We do not enjoy the freedom of England: but we are contented. My imprisonment, for instance, of which you have heard, was certainly a violent measure; but I knew I had abused my liberty, and there were moments when I could not help approving of my arrest, although the legal formalities had been omitted."

V. "If that be the case, nobody is free in Venice."

C. "Perhaps so. But you will confess that to be free, it is sufficient to think

oneself free.”

V. "I do not immediately grant this. Even the members of your aristocracy are not free. They cannot, for example, go abroad without permission."

C. "The law, which prevents them, was made by themselves. It was intended to uphold their sovereignty. Would you say the citizen of Bern is not free, because he is bound by regulations of expense. He has himself assisted in forming these laws."

Voltaire wishing to change the subject of our conversation, asked me, whence I came ?

C. "From Roches. I should never have forgiven myself, had I left Switzerland without having seen the celebrated Haller. It has ever been a feast to me to pay my homage to the great geniuses of the age, and you have now furnished the seasoning."

V. "You must have been pleased with Monsieur de Haller."

C. "I spent three delightful days with him."

V. "I congratulate you. He is a man to whom we must bow."

C. "I think so too. You render him justice. I lament that he did not exercise equal justice towards you."

V. "Ha! Ha! Ha! He thinks ill of me, and I think well of him. Very possi bly we are both mistaken."

We all applauded this answer. Its chief value consisted in its promptness.

We now concluded our conversation on literary subjects: and I remained silent as long as Voltaire continued with the company. I then paid my respects to Madame Denis, offering to execute any commissions she might have for Rome, and prepared for my departure, not without self-satisfaction at my last combat with this athletic champion; but also with some portion of chagrin, which, for ten years, made me a severe judge of all that I read, both old and new, from the pen of this great man.

TABLE TALK. NO. III.

On Milton's Sonnets.

THE great object of the Sonnet seems to be, to express in musical numbers, and as it were with undivided breath, some occasional thought or personal feeling, some fee-grief due to the poet's breast." It is a sigh uttered from the fulness of the heart, an involuntary aspiration born and dying in the same moment. I have always been fond of Milton's Sonnets for this reason, that they have more of this personal and internal character than any others; and they acquire a double value when we consider that they come from the pen of the loftiest of our poets. Compared with Paradise Lost, they are like tender flowers that adorn the base of some proud column or stately temple. The author in the one could work himself up with unabated fortitude "to the height of his great argument;" but in the other he has shown that he could condescend to men of low estate, and after the lightning and the thunder-bolt of his pen, lets fall some drops of natural pity over hapless infirmity, mingling strains with the nightingale's, "most musical, most melancholy." The immortal poet pours his mortal sorrows into our breasts, and a tear falls from his sightless orbs on the friendly hand he presses. The Sonnets are a kind of pensive record of past achievements, loves, and friendships, and a noble exhortation to himself to bear up with cheerful hope and confidence to the last. Some of them are of a more quaint and humorous character; but I speak of those only, which are intended to be serious and pathetical.—I do not know indeed but they may be said to be almost the first effusions of this sort of natural and personal sentiment in the language. Drummond's ought perhaps to be excepted, were they formed less closely on the model of Petrarch's, so as to be often little more than translations of the Italian poet. But Milton's Sonnets are truly his own in allusion, thought, and versification. Those of Sir Philip Sydney, who was a great transgressor in his way, turn sufficiently on himself and his own adventures; but they are elaborately quaint and intricate, and more like riddles than sonnets. They are "very tolerable and not to be endured." Shakspeare's, which some persons better informed in such matters than I can pretend to be, profess to cry up as "the divine, the matchless, what you will,"-to say nothing of the want of point or a leading, prominent idea in most of them, are I think overcharged and monotonous, and as to their ultimate drift, as for myself, I can make neither head nor tail of it. Yet some of them, I own, are sweet even to a sense of faintness, luscious as the woodbine, and graceful and luxuriant like it. Here is one.

"From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing;

That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leaped with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell

Of different flowers in odour and in hue,

Could make me any summer's story tell,

Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew :
Nor did I wonder at the lilies white,

Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and you away,
As with your shadow, I with these did play."

I am not aware of any writer of Sonnets worth mentioning here till long after Milton, that is, till the time of Warton and the revival of a taste for Italian and for our own early literature. During the rage for French models, the Sonnet had not been much studied. It is a mode of composition that depends entirely on expression; and this the French and artificial style gladly dispenses with, as it lays no particular stress on any thing except vague, general common-places. Warton's Sonnets are undoubtedly exquisite, both in style and matter: they are poetical and philosophical effusions of very delightful sentiment; but the thoughts, though fine and deeply felt, are not, like Milton's subjects, identified completely with the writer, and so far want a more individual interest. Mr. Wordsworth's are also finely conceived, and high-sounding Sonnets. They mouth it well, and are said to be sacred to Liberty. Brutus's exclamation, "Oh Virtue, I thought thee a substance, but I find thee a shadow," was not considered as a compliment, but as a bitter sarcasm. The beauty of Milton's Sonnets is their sincerity, the spirit of poetical patriotism which they breathe. Either Milton's or the living bard's are defective in this respect. There is no Sonnet of Milton's on the Restoration of Charles II. There is no Sonnet of Mr. Wordsworth's, corresponding to that of "the poet blind and bold," On the late Massacre in Piedmont. Mr. Wordsworth has neither Milton's imagination, nor his principle. Milton did not worship the rising sun, nor turn his back on a losing and fallen cause.

"Such recantation had no charms for him!"

Mr. Southey has thought proper to put the author of Paradise Lost into his late Heaven, on the understood condition that he is "no longer to kings and to hierarchs hostile." In his life-time, he gave no sign of such an alteration; and it is rather presumptuous in the poet-laureate to pursue the deceased antagonist of Salmasius into the other world to compliment him with his own infirmity of purpose. It is a wonder he did not add in a note, that Milton called him aside to whisper in his ear that he preferred the new English hexameters to his own blank verse! Our first of poets was one of our first of men. He was an eminent instance to prove that a poet is not another name for the slave of power and fashion; as is the case with painters and musicians-things without an opinion-and who merely aspire to make up the pageant and show of the day. There are persons in common life who have that eager curiosity and restless admiration of bustle and splendour, that sooner than not be admitted on great occasions of feasting and luxurious display, they will go in the character of livery-servants to stand behind the chairs of the great. There are others who can so little bear to be left for any length of time out of the grand carnival and masquerade of pride and folly, that they will gain admittance to it at the expense of their characters as well as of a change of dress. Milton was not one of these. He had too much of the ideal faculty in his composition, a lofty contemplative principle, and consciousness of inward power and worth, to be tempted by such idle baits. We have plenty of chanting and chiming in among some modern writers with the triumphs over their own views and principles; but none of a patient resignation to defeat, sustaining and nourishing itself with the thought of the justice of their cause, and with firm-fixed rectitude. I do not pretend to defend

the tone of Milton's political writings (which was borrowed from the style of controversial divinity), or to say that he was right in the part he took:-I say that he was consistent in it, and did not convict himself of error: he was consistent in it in spite of danger and obloquy, "on evil days though fallen, and evil tongues," and therefore his character has the salt of honesty about it. It does not offend in the nostrils of posterity. He had taken his part boldly and stood to it manfully, and submitted to the change of times with pious fortitude, building his consolations on the resources of his own mind and the recollection of the past, instead of endeavouring to make himself a retreat for the time to come. As an instance of this, we may take one of the best and most admired of these Sonnets, that addressed to Cyriac Skinner, on his own blindness.

"Cyriac, this three years' day, these eyes, though clear,
To outward view, of blemish or of spot,
Bereft of light their seeing have forgot,
Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear
Of sun, or moon, or star throughout the year,
Of man, or woman. Yet I argue not

Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up and steer

Right onward. What supports me, dost thou ask?

The conscience, Friend, t' have lost them overply'd
In liberty's defence, my noble task,

Of which all Europe talks from side to side.

This thought might lead me through the world's vain mask,
Content though blind, had I no better guide."

Nothing can exceed the mild, subdued tone of this Sonnet, nor the striking grandeur of the concluding thought. It is curious to remark what seems to be a trait of character in the two first lines. From Milton's care to inform the reader that "his eyes were still clear to outward view of spot or blemish," it would be thought that he had not yet given up all regard to personal appearance; a feeling to which his singular beauty at an earlier age might be supposed naturally enough to lead. -Of the political or (what may be called) his State Sonnets, those to Cromwell, to Fairfax, and to the younger Vane, are full of exalted praise and dignified advice. They are neither familiar nor servile. The writer knows what is due to power and to fame. He feels the true, unassumed equality of greatness. He pays the full tribute of admiration for great acts achieved, and suggests becoming occasion to deserve higher praise. That to Cromwell is a proof how completely our poet maintained the erectness of his understanding and spirit in his intercourse with men in power. It is such a compliment as a poet might pay to a conqueror and head of the state, without the possibility of self-degradation.

"Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud,
Not of war only, but detractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,

To peace and truth thy glorious way hast plough'd,
And on the neck of crowned fortune proud
Hast rear'd God's trophies, and his work pursued,
While Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbrued,
And Dunbar-field resounds thy praises loud,

And Worcester's laureat wreath. Yet much remains

To conquer still; peace hath her victòries
To less renown'd than war: new foes arise
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains:
Help us to save free conscience from the paw

Of hireling wolves, whose gospel is their maw."

The most spirited and impassioned of them all, and the most inspired with a sort of prophetic fury, is the one entitled, On the late Massacre in Piedmont.

66

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughter'd saints, whose bones
Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold;

Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipp'd stocks and stones,
Forget not in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese that roll'd
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To Heaven. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundred fold, who having learn'd thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian wo."

In the Nineteenth Sonnet, which is also On his Blindness, we see the jealous watchfulness of his mind over the use of his high gifts, and the beautiful manner in which he satisfies himself that virtuous thoughts and intentions are not the least acceptable offering to the Almighty. "When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
Doth God exact day-labour, light denied,

I fondly ask? But patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies, God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best; his state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

Those to Mr. Henry Lawes on his Airs, and to Mr. Lawrence, can never be enough admired. They breathe the very soul of music and friendship. Both have a tender, thoughtful grace; and for their lightness, with a certain melancholy complaining intermixed, might be stolen from the harp of Eolus. The last is the picture of a day spent in social retirement and elegant relaxation from severer studies. We sit with the poet at table, and hear his familiar sentiments from his own lips afterwards.

"Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,

Now that the fields are dank and ways are mire,
Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
From the hard season gaining? Time will run
On smoother, till Favonius reinspire
The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
The lily and rose, that neither sow'd nor spun.

VOL. III. No, 15.-1822.

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