sufficient for him to measure his own strength on the most renowned arena of literature in Europe, and to receive and to give knowledge in a generous traffic with the first men of the age. If his course was rapid and brilliant, it was not useless to others or to himself. He was a meteor which, gathering all the luminous particles within the sphere of its attraction, absorbed and blended them with its own radiant body for the sole purpose of diffusing a stronger emanation of light. The time for which he suspended his journey at Geneva, the Rome of Calvinism, is not related; and we only know that it was sufficiently long for him to contract an intimacy and friendship with two of its most eminent theologians, Frederic Spanheim and Giovanni Deodati, the uncle of his friend Charles. From Geneva he retraced his former road through France, and arrived in England, after an absence of a year and three months, about the time of the King's a The advantage, which he is supposed to have gained from Galileo's conversation, has already been mentioned; and we, with some of his other biographers, have inferred the growth and direction which his imagination acquired from the works of the great painters of Italy. His intercourse with Manso may perhaps be classed with the prime benefits resulting from his transalpine visit. return from his second expedition against Scotland, when his disaffected forces had been obliged by Leslie to retreat. The crisis was striking, and the mind of Milton, checked as he had been by his patriotism in his pursuit of an interesting object, was undoubtedly very powerfully affected by it. His public sensations however were for a time overpowered by those which resulted from the calamity of a private loss. Affliction met his first step on British ground, and wrung his heart for the death of his beloved friend, Charles Deodati. He had indeed, while abroad, been touched by a rumour of this melancholy event: but he was now wounded with the fatal certainty; and what was formerly softened by distance and the engagements of a new scene was at this moment made painfully present to him by its association with almost every object which occurred to his eye. Young Deodati, who seems to have merited the place which he possessed in Milton's regard, was a native of England though of an Italian family, ori The soldiers, with a just feeling of the cause in which they were engaged, refused to fight. The King was heard to say "that his army, he thought, feared not to encounter men or devils, and yet he could not make them strike a stroke against the Scots." ginally from Lucca but in its last generation established at Geneva. His father, Theodore, came early in life to England aud, marrying a lady of good family and fortune, settied himself in this country, and practised as a physician. The son was bred to the profession of his father; and, having attained to very eminent proficiency in literature, he was now commencing the exercise of his professional duties in Cheshire, when his premature death disappointed the friendship of Milton and the hopes of the world. The immediate cause or the precise time of this event, which happened when our author was at Florence, is no where, as I can find, mentioned. That it excited all his sensibilities cannot be doubted, since the Latin pastoral, in which, as he expresses it, he laments his solitude, bears, deeply stampt upon the gold of poetry, the genuine impression of sorrow, and is as honourable to his heart as it is to his talents. d This effusion of strong grief, lowered into melancholy and powerful to incline without oppressing the fancy, is entitled to very high regard from every reader of taste. It has Nec dum aderat Thyrsis, pastorem scilicet illum Ep. Dam. 1. 12. d Se suamque solitudinem hoc carmine deplorat. Arg. E. D. been censured and has been defended: but the deed in either case will perhaps be viewed with indifference by the unprejudiced and able critic. "It is written," as it has been superciliously observed, "with the common but childish imitation of pastoral life;' and this has been excused "as the fault of the poet's age;" and as compensated by some passages in the poem, "wandering far beyond the bounds of bucolic song." "Childish imi tation" is every where the proper object of censure, or, to speak more accurately, of contempt: but how the imitation of any mode of social life can with justice be thus, generally and without reference to the execution, condemned and stigmatised as childish; or how a writer can be honestly made the subject of contemptuous remark for employing any allowed and established species of composition as the vehicle of his thoughts, is more than I can possibly comprehend. The defence of pastoral poetry in the abstract would be a very easy task: but the digression, which it would induce, would lead us too far and detain us too long from our principal topic. For our immediate purpose it will be sufficient. * See Johnson's Life of Milton. f See Warton's note at the end of the poem, in his edition of Milton's Juvenile poetry. for us to assert, without the fear of contradiction, that there have been ages of simplicity in which the higher members of the social combination were husbandmen or shepherds, and in which the manners of rural life have supplied the imitation of poetry with some of its most pleasing subjects. From that exquisite composition, the "Song of Solomon," to the Idyllia of Theocritus, or even perhaps to those of our contemporary, Gesner, the offspring of the pastoral Muse have obtained and gratified readers of the most cultivated taste. will form in the present instance a complete vindication of Milton; who when he chose to embody his sorrow in the form of a pastoral, to invoke the powers of song that once warbled in the fields of Sicily, and to trace the steps of Theocritus and of Virgil, could not be aware that he was exposing himself to the sneer of the critic, and to the charge of childish imitation. This The climate and the manners, if not the language of Britain, oppose its being the scene of pastoral poetry; and no person can object more strongly than myself to the writer of English bucolics, who must either violate probability by the introduction of classic names and manners, or outrage taste by the exhibition of common and coarse nature, |