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So far as humbleness was concerned, there was no lack of that. There are some inflictions which, although terrible, are capable of stirring in haughty human hearts a rebellious indignation. But to cold succumb soul and mind. It has always seemed to me that cold would have broken down Milton's Satan.
That such was the tenor of the Petition of the Stationers, and that they gave instances of illegal pamphlets of the kind described, and laid stress on Milton's Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce as one most flagrant instance, appears from the action of the House of Commons in consequence.
The idealistic poet weans his eyes from their pragmatic character in varying degree. Browning notes his But the poet sometimes goes farther, making it his ideal to and may thus conceive of the master-poet as necessarily blind. Milton's noble lines on blindness in Samson Agonistes have had much to do, undoubtedly, with the conceptions of later poets.
You've improved, though, since you had to translate Milton's "Smoothing the raven down Of darkness, till it smiled; "when, you remember, I gave you a literal version of your `Iambi, which meant `pounding a pea-green fog. Eh?" "Oh, yes," said Julian, "I remember too that I rendered `the moon-beams' by `the moon's rafters."
We see, in the instance of Milton's juvenile poems in Latin, not to mention others, to what excellence this species of skill may be brought, even in boyhood, where the organs are finely disposed for the perception of musical delight; and if examples of the same early perfection be rarer in our own tongue, it may be because so much labour is seldom or ever exacted, at that age, in the use of it.
Philips, in his "Splendid Shilling," has caught the trick exactly: Philips has caught, I say, Milton's trick; his real secret he could never divine, for where Milton is best, he is incomparable.
Suppose I had asked you, for instance, to seek for Shakespeare's opinion, instead of Milton's on this matter of Church authority? or for Dante's? Have any of you, at this instant, the least idea what either thought about it? Have you ever balanced the scene with the bishops in 'Richard III. against the character of Cranmer? the description of St. Francis and St.
Featley in his Tetrachordon on account of a passage in this treatise, had not allowed the vulgarity of the engraving in Featley's book to escape. "For which I do not commend his marshalling" had been Milton's punning notice of it in a parenthesis of the punishment. When, therefore, Mr. Marshall came to Milton from Moseley, Milton must have remembered him as the caricaturist for Dr. Featley's book.
The passage, therefore, cannot be quoted as Milton's testimony in favour of the so-called modern Permissive Bill. It is dead the reverse. And yet there is a lurking kindness in the passage towards a Permissive Bill of that sort, contemplated as possible, though yet unheard of; and, though Milton's principle of Liberty would have bound him to oppose it, he would perhaps have done so reluctantly.
Consequently the visitor, in attempting to set foot upon Jupiter, might find no solid supporting surface, but would be in a situation as embarrassing as that of Milton's Satan when he undertook to cross the domain of Chaos: "Fluttering his pinions vain, plumb down he drops, Ten thousand fathom deep, and to this hour Down had been falling had not, by ill chance, The strong rebuff of some tumultuous cloud.
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