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But still this inhuman extravagance of Bentley, in following out his hypothesis, does not exonerate us from bearing in mind so much truth as that hypothesis really must have had, from the pitiable difficulties of the great poet’s situation.

My own opinion, therefore, upon the line, for instance, from ‘Paradise Regained,’ which Mr. Landor appears to have indicated for the reader’s amazement, viz.:–

‘As well might recommend
Such solitude before choicest society,’

is–that it escaped revision from some accident calling off the ear of Milton whilst in the act of having the proof read to him. Mr. Landor silently prints it in italics, without assigning his objection; but, of course that objection must be–that the line has one foot too much. It is an Alexandrine, such as Dryden scattered so profusely, without asking himself why; but which Milton never tolerates except in the choruses of the Samson.

‘Not difficult, if thou hearken to me‘–

is one of the lines which Mr. Landor thinks that ‘no authority will reconcile’ to our ears. I think otherwise. The caesura is meant to fall not with the comma after difficult , but after thou; and there is a most effective and grand suspension intended. It is Satan who speaks– Satan in the wilderness; and he marks, as he wishes to mark, the tremendous opposition of attitude between the two parties to the temptation.

‘Not difficult if thou—-‘

there let the reader pause, as if pulling up suddenly four horses in harness, and throwing them on their haunches–not difficult if thou (in some mysterious sense the son of God); and then, as with a burst of thunder, again giving the reins to your quadriga,

‘—-hearken to me:’

that is, to me, that am the Prince of the Air, and able to perform all my promises for those that hearken to any temptations.

Two lines are cited under the same ban of irreconcilability to our ears, but on a very different plea. The first of these lines is–

‘Launcelot, or Pellias, or Pellinore;‘

The other
‘Quintius, Fabricius, Curius, Regulus.‘

The reader will readily suppose that both are objected to as ‘roll-calls of proper names.’ Now, it is very true that nothing is more offensive to the mind than the practice of mechanically packing into metrical successions, as if packing a portmanteau, names without meaning or significance to the feelings. No man ever carried that atrocity so far as Boileau, a fact of which Mr. Landor is well aware; and slight is the sanction or excuse that can be drawn from him. But it must not be forgotten that Virgil, so scrupulous in finish of composition, committed this fault. I remember a passage ending

‘—-Noemonaque Prytaninque;’

but, having no Virgil within reach, I cannot at this moment quote it accurately. Homer, with more excuse, however, from the rudeness of his age, is a deadly offender in this way. But the cases from Milton are very different. Milton was incapable of the Homeric or Virgilian blemish. The objection to such rolling musketry of names is, that unless interspersed with epithets, or broken into irregular groups by brief circumstances of parentage, country, or romantic incident, they stand audaciously perking up their heads like lots in a catalogue, arrow-headed palisades, or young larches in a nursery ground, all occupying the same space, all drawn up in line, all mere iterations of each other. But in

‘Quintius, Fabricius, Curius, Regulus,‘

though certainly not a good line when insulated (better, however, in its connection with the entire succession of which it forms part), the apology is, that the massy weight of the separate characters enables them to stand like granite pillars or pyramids, proud of their self-supporting independency.

Mr. Landor makes one correction by a simple improvement in the punctuation, which has a very fine effect. Rarely has so large a result been distributed through a sentence by so slight a change. It is in the ‘Samson.’ Samson says, speaking of himself (as elsewhere) with that profound pathos, which to all hearts invests Milton’s own situation in the days of his old age, when he was composing that drama–