Cooper’s Hill is the work that confers upon him the rank and dignity of an original author. He seems to have been, at least among us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection, or incidental meditation.
To trace a new scheme of poetry, has, in itself, a very high claim to praise, and its praise is yet more, when it is apparently copied by Garth and Pope; after whose names little will be gained by an enumeration of smaller poets, that have left scarcely a corner of the island not dignified either by rhyme or blank verse.
Cooper’s Hill, if it be maliciously inspected, will not be found without its faults. The digressions are too long, the morality too frequent, and the sentiments, sometimes, such as will not bear a rigorous inquiry.
The four verses, which, since Dryden has commended them, almost every writer for a century past has imitated, are generally known:
O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage, without o’erflowing full.
The lines, are, in themselves, not perfect; for most of the words, thus artfully opposed, are to be understood simply on one side of the comparison, and metaphorically on the other; and, if there be any language which does not express intellectual operations by material images, into that language they cannot be translated. But so much meaning is comprised in so few words; the particulars of resemblance are so perspicaciously collected, and every mode of excellence separated from its adjacent fault by so nice a line of limitation; the different parts of the sentence are so accurately adjusted; and the flow of the last couplet is so smooth and sweet; that the passage, however celebrated, has not been praised above its merit. It has beauty peculiar to itself, and must be numbered among those felicities which cannot be produced at will by wit and labour, but must rise unexpectedly in some hour propitious to poetry.
He appears to have been one of the first that understood the necessity of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting lines, and interpreting single words. How much this servile practice obscured the clearest, and deformed the most beautiful parts of the ancient authors, may be discovered by a perusal of our earlier versions; some of them are the works of men well qualified, not only by critical knowledge, but by poetical genius, who yet, by a mistaken ambition of exactness, degraded, at once, their originals and themselves.
Denham saw the better way, but has not pursued it with great success. His versions of Virgil are not pleasing; but they taught Dryden to please better. His poetical imitation of Tully on Old Age has neither the clearness of prose, nor the sprightliness of poetry.
The “strength of Denham,” which Pope so emphatically mentions, is to be found in many lines and couplets, which convey much meaning in few words, and exhibit the sentiment with more weight than bulk.
On the Thames.
Though with those streams he no resemblance hold,
Whose foam is amber, and their gravel gold;
His genuine and less guilty wealth t’ explore,
Search not his bottom, but survey his shore.
On Strafford.
His wisdom such, at once, it did appear
Three kingdoms’ wonder, and three kingdoms’ fear.
While single he stood forth, and seem’d, although
Each had an army, as an equal foe;
Such was his force of eloquence to make
The hearers more concern’d than he that spake:
Each seem’d to act that part he came to see,
And none was more a looker-on than he;
So did he move our passions, some were known
To wish, for the defence, the crime their own.
Now private pity strove with public hate,
Reason with rage, and eloquence with fate.
On Cowley.
To him no author was unknown,
Yet what he wrote was all his own;
Horace’s wit, and Virgil’s state,
He did not steal, but emulate!
And, when he would like them appear,
Their garb, but not their clothes, did wear.
As one of Denham’s principal claims to the regard of posterity arises from his improvement of our numbers, his versification ought to be considered. It will afford that pleasure which arises from the observation of a man of judgment naturally right, forsaking bad copies by degrees, and advancing towards a better practice, as he gains more confidence in himself.
In his translation of Virgil, written when he was about twenty-one years old, may be still found the old manner of continuing the sense ungracefully from verse to verse:
Then all those
Who in the dark our fury did escape,
Returning, know our borrow’d arms, and shape,
And differing dialect; then their numbers swell
And grow upon us; first Choroebus fell
Before Minerva’s altar; next did bleed
Just Ripheus, whom no Trojan did exceed
In virtue, yet the gods his fate decreed.
Then Hypanis and Dymas, wounded by
Their friends; nor thee, Pantheus, thy piety,
Nor consecrated mitre, from the same
Ill fate could save; my country’s funeral flame
And Troy’s cold ashes I attest, and call
To witness for myself, that in their fall
No foes, no death, nor danger, I declin’d,
Did, and deserv’d no less, my fate to find.
From this kind of concatenated metre he afterwards refrained, and taught his followers the art of concluding their sense in couplets; which has, perhaps, been with rather too much constancy pursued.
This passage exhibits one of those triplets which are not unfrequent in this first essay, but which it is to be supposed his maturer judgment disapproved, since, in his latter works, he has totally forborne them.
His rhymes are such as seem found without difficulty, by following the sense; and are, for the most part, as exact, at least, as those of other poets, though now and then the reader is shifted off with what he can get:
O how transform’d!
How much unlike that Hector, who return’d
Clad in Achilles’ spoils!
And again:
From thence a thousand lesser poets sprung
Like petty princes from the fall of Rome.
Sometimes the weight of rhyme is laid upon a word too feeble to sustain it:
Troy confounded falls
From all her glories: if it might have stood
By any power, by this right hand it shou’d.
— And though my outward state misfortune hath
Deprest thus low, it cannot reach my faith.
— Thus, by his fraud and our own faith o’ercome,
A feigned tear destroys us, against whom
Tydides nor Achilles could prevail,
Nor ten years’ conflict, nor a thousand sail.
He is not very careful to vary the ends of his verses; in one passage the word die rhymes three couplets in six.
Most of these petty faults are in his first productions, when he was less skilful, or, at least, less dexterous in the use of words; and though they had been more frequent, they could only have lessened the grace, not the strength of his composition. He is one of the writers that improved our taste, and advanced our language, and whom we ought, therefore, to read with gratitude, though, having done much, he left much to do.
Trin. Coll.
“1631. Nov. 18. Johannes Denham, Essex. filius J. Denham de Horsley-parva in com. praedict. militis, annos natus 16. MALONE”.]
MILTON.
The life of Milton has been already written in so many forms, and with such minute inquiry, that I might, perhaps, more properly hav
e contented myself with the addition of a few notes on Mr. Fenton’s elegant Abridgment, but that a new narrative was thought necessary to the uniformity of this edition.
John Milton was, by birth, a gentleman, descended from the proprietors of Milton, near Thame, in Oxfordshire, one of whom forfeited his estate in the times of York and Lancaster. Which side he took I know not; his descendant inherited no veneration for the white rose.
His grandfather, John, was keeper of the forest of Shotover, a zealous papist, who disinherited his son, because he had forsaken the religion of his ancestors.
His father, John, who was the son disinherited, had recourse, for his support, to the profession of a scrivener. He was a man eminent for his skill in musick, many of his compositions being still to be found; and his reputation in his profession was such, that he grew rich, and retired to an estate. He had, probably, more than common literature, as his son addresses him in one of his most elaborate Latin poems. He married a gentlewoman of the name of Caston, a Welsh family, by whom he had two sons, John, the poet, and Christopher, who studied the law, and adhered, as the law taught him, to the king’s party, for which he was awhile persecuted, but having, by his brother’s interest, obtained permission to live in quiet, he supported himself so honourably by chamber practice, that, soon after the accession of king James, he was knighted, and made a judge; but, his constitution being too weak for business, he retired before any disreputable compliances became necessary.
He had, likewise, a daughter, Anne, whom he married with a considerable fortune, to Edward Philips, who came from Shrewsbury, and rose in the crown office to be secondary: by him she had two sons, John and Edward, who were educated by the poet, and from whom is derived the only authentick account of his domestick manners.
John, the poet, was born in his father’s house, at the Spread-eagle, in Bread street, Dec. 9, 1608, between six and seven in the morning. His father appears to have been very solicitous about his education; for he was instructed, at first, by private tuition, under the care of Thomas Young, who was afterwards chaplain to the English merchants at Hamburgh, and of whom we have reason to think well, since his scholar considered him as worthy of an epistolary elegy.
He was then sent to St. Paul’s school, under the care of Mr. Gill; and removed, in the beginning of his sixteenth year, to Christ’s college in Cambridge, where he entered a sizar, Feb. 12,1624.
He was, at this time, eminently skilled in the Latin tongue; and he himself, by annexing the dates to his first compositions, a boast of which the learned Politian had given him an example, seems to commend the earliness of his own proficiency to the notice of posterity. But the products of his vernal fertility have been surpassed by many, and particularly by his contemporary Cowley. Of the powers of the mind it is difficult to form an estimate: many have excelled Milton in their first essays, who never rose to works like Paradise Lost.
At fifteen, a date which he uses till he is sixteen, he translated or versified two psalms, 114 and 136, which he thought worthy of the publick eye; but they raise no great expectations: they would, in any numerous school, have obtained praise, but not excited wonder.
Many of his elegies appear to have been written in his eighteenth year, by which it appears that he had then read the Roman authors with very nice discernment. I once heard Mr. Hampton, the translator of Polybius, remark, what I think is true, that Milton was the first Englishman who, after the revival of letters, wrote Latin verses with classick elegance. If any exceptions can be made, they are very few: Haddon and Ascham, the pride of Elizabeth’s reign, however they have succeeded in prose, no sooner attempt verse than they provoke derision. If we produced any thing worthy of notice before the elegies of Milton, it was, perhaps, Alabaster’s Roxana.
Of the exercises which the rules of the university required, some were published by him in his maturer years. They had been undoubtedly applauded; for they were such as few can perform; yet there is reason to suspect that he was regarded in his college with no great fondness. That he obtained no fellowship is certain; but the unkindness with which he was treated, was not merely negative. I am ashamed to relate what I fear is true, that Milton was one of the last students in either university, that suffered the publick indignity of corporal correction.
It was, in the violence of controversial hostility, objected to him, that he was expelled: this he steadily denies, and it was apparently not true; but it seems plain, from his own verses to Diodati, that he had incurred rustication, a temporary dismission into the country, with, perhaps, the loss of a term:
Me tenet urbs, reflua quam Thamesis alluit unda,
Meque nec invitum patria dulcis habet.
Jam nec arundiferum mihi cura revisere Camum,
Nec dudum vetiti me laris angit amor.
Nec duri libet usque minas perferre magistri,
Caeteraque ingenio non subeunda meo.
Si sit hoc exilium patrios adiise penates,
Et vacuum curis otia grata sequi,
Non ego vel profugi nomen sortemve recuso,
Laetus et exilii conditione fruor.
I cannot find any meaning but this, which even kindness and reverence can give to the term “vetiti laris,” a habitation from which he is excluded; or how exile can be otherwise interpreted. He declares yet more, that he is weary of enduring “the threats of a rigorous master, and something else, which a temper like his cannot undergo.” What was more than threat was probably punishment. This poem, which mentions his exile, proves, likewise, that it was not perpetual; for it concludes with a resolution of returning some time to Cambridge. And it may be conjectured, from the willingness with which he has perpetuated the memory of his exile, that its cause was such as gave him no shame.
He took both the usual degrees; that of Bachelor in 1628, and that of master in 1632; but he left the university with no kindness for its institution, alienated either by the injudicious severity of his governours, or his own captious perverseness. The cause cannot now be known, but the effect appears in his writings. His scheme of education, inscribed to Hartlib, supersedes all academical instruction, being intended to comprise the whole time which men usually spend in literature, from their entrance upon grammar, “till they proceed, as it is called, masters of arts.” And in his discourse on the likeliest way to remove Hirelings out of the Church, he ingeniously proposes, that “the profits of the lands forfeited by the act for superstitious uses should be applied to such academies all over the land, where languages and arts may be taught together; so that youth may be, at once, brought up to a competency of learning and an honest trade, by which means such of them as had the gift, being enabled to support themselves, without tithes, by the latter, may, by the help of the former, become worthy preachers.”
One of his objections to academical education, as it was then conducted, is, that men designed for orders in the church were permitted to act plays, “writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antick and dishonest gestures of Trincalos, buffoons, and bawds, prostituting the shame of that ministry which they had, or were near having, to the eyes of courtiers and court ladies, their grooms and mademoiselles.”
This is sufficiently peevish in a man, who, when he mentions his exile from the college, relates, with great luxuriance, the compensation which the pleasures of the theatre afford him. Plays were, therefore, only criminal when they were acted by academicks.
He went to the university with a design of entering into the church, but in time altered his mind; for he declared, that whoever became a clergyman must “subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which, unless he took with a conscience that could retch, he must straight perjure himself. He thought it better to prefer a blameless silence, before the office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing.”
These expressions are, I find, applied to the subscription of the articles; but it seems more probable that they relate to canonical obedience. I know not any of the articles which seem to thwart his opinions; but the th
oughts of obedience, whether canonical or civil, raised his indignation.
His unwillingness to engage in the ministry, perhaps not yet advanced to a settled resolution of declining it, appears in a letter to one of his friends, who had reproved his suspended and dilatory life, which he seems to have imputed to an insatiable curiosity, and fantastick luxury of various knowledge. To this he writes a cool and plausible answer, in which he endeavours to persuade him, that the delay proceeds not from the delights of desultory study, but from the desire of obtaining more fitness for his task; and that he goes on, “not taking thought of being late, so it gives advantage to be more fit.”
When he left the university he returned to his father, then residing at Horton, in Buckinghamshire, with whom he lived five years; in which time he is said to have read all the Greek and Latin writers. With what limitations this universality is to be understood, who shall inform us?
It might be supposed, that he who read so much should have done nothing else; but Milton found time to write the Masque of Comus, which was presented at Ludlow, then the residence of the lord president of Wales, in 1634; and had the honour of being acted by the earl of Bridgewater’s sons and daughter. The fiction is derived from Homer’s Circe; but we never can refuse to any modern the liberty of borrowing from Homer:
— “a quo ceu fonte perenni Vatum Pieriis ora rigantur aquis.”
His next production was Lycidas, an elegy, written in 1637, on the death of Mr. King, the son of sir John King, secretary for Ireland in the time of Elizabeth, James, and Charles. King was much a favourite at Cambridge, and many of the wits joined to do honour to his memory. Milton’s acquaintance with the Italian writers may be discovered by a mixture of longer and shorter verses, according to the rules of Tuscan poetry, and his malignity to the church by some lines which are interpreted as threatening its extermination.
He is supposed about this time to have written his Arcades; for, while he lived at Horton, he used sometimes to steal from his studies a few days, which he spent at Harefield, the house of the countess dowager of Derby, where the Arcades made part of a dramatick entertainment.
He began now to grow weary of the country, and had some purpose of taking chambers in the inns of court, when the death of his mother set him at liberty to travel, for which he obtained his father’s consent, and sir Henry Wotton’s directions; with the celebrated precept of prudence, “i pensieri stretti, ed il viso sciolto;” thoughts close, and looks loose.
Complete Works of Samuel Johnson Page 423