the cerements are ready to render them un- without content, nights without sleep, throughout changeable.

Esop. Strange indeed. When a traveller is And now remove thy head: the cheek is cool about to wander on a desert, it is strange to lead enough after its little shower of tears.

Rhodope. Proud man! and you tell me to go! do you? do you? Answer me at least. Must I? and so soon?

Esop. Child! begone!

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Rhodope. Oh Esop! you are already more my master than Xanthus is. I will run and tell him so and I will implore of him, upon my knees, never to impose on you a command so hard to obey.

ANDREW MARVEL AND BISHOP PARKER.*

Parker. Most happy am I to encounter you, Mr. Marvel. It is some time, I think, since we met. May I take the liberty of inquiring what brought you into such a lonely quarter as BunhillFields?

Marvel. My lord, I return at this instant from visiting an old friend of ours, hard-by, in Artillery-Walk, who, you will be happy to hear, bears his blindness and asthma with truly Christian courage.

the soliloquy of late compassion or of virtuous repentance: it is frequently the cry of blind and impotent and wounded pride, angry at itself for having neglected a good bargain, a rich reversion. Believe me, my lord bishop, there are few whom God has promoted to serve the truly great. They are never to be superseded, nor are their names to be obliterated in earth or heaven. Were I to trust my observation rather than my feelings, I should believe that friendship is only a state of

Parker. And pray, who may that old friend be, transition to enmity. The wise, the excellent in Mr. Marvel?

Marvel. Honest John Milton. Parker. The same gentleman whose ingenious poem, on our first parents, you praised in some elegant verses prefixed to it?

Marvel. The same who likewise, on many occasions, merited and obtained your lordship's approbation.

Parker. I am happy to understand that no harsh measures were taken against him, on the return of our most gracious sovran. And it occurs to me that you, Mr. Marvel, were earnest in his behalf. Indeed I myself might have stirred upon it, had Mr. Milton solicited me in the hour of need. Marvel. He is grateful to the friends who consulted at the same time his dignity and his safety: but gratitude can never be expected to grow on a soil hardened by solicitation. Those who are the most ambitious of power are often the least ambitious of glory. It requires but little sagacity to foresee that a name will become invested with eternal brightness by belonging to a benefactor of Milton. I might have served him! is not always

honour and integrity, whom it was once our ambition to converse with, soon appear in our sight no higher than the ordinary class of our acquaintance; then become fit objects to set our own slender wits against, to contend with, to interrogate, to subject to the arbitration, not of their equals, but of ours; and lastly, what indeed is less injustice and less indignity, to neglect, abandon, and disown.

Parker. I never have doubted that Mr. Milton is a learned man; indeed he has proven it: and there are many who, like yourself, see considerable merit in his poems. I confess that I am an indifferent judge in these matters; and I can only hope that he has now corrected what is erroneous in his doctrines.

Marvel. Latterly he hath never changed a jot, in acting or thinking.

Parker. Wherein I hold him blameable, well aware as I am that never to change is thought an indication of rectitude and wisdom. But if everything in this world is progressive; if everything is defective; if our growth, if our faculties, are obvious and certain signs of it; then surely we

conditions. Consciousness of error is, to a certain extent, a consciousness of understanding; and correction of error is the plainest proof of energy and mastery.

* He wrote a work entitled, as Hooker's was, Ecclesias-should and must be different in different ages and tical Polity, in which are these words: "It is better to submit to the unreasonable impositions of Nero and Caligula than to hazard the dissolution of the state." It is plain enough to what impositions he recommended the duty of submission: for, in our fiscal sense of the word, none ever bore more lightly on the subject than Caligula's and Nero's: even the provinces were taxed very moderately and fairly by them. He adds, "Princes may with less danger give liberty to men's vices and debaucheries than to their consciences." Marvel answered him in his Rehearsal Transposed, in which he says of Milton, "I well remember that, being one day at his house, I there first met you, and accidentally. Then it was that you

wandered up and down Moor-fields, astrologising upon the duration of His Majesty's Government. You frequented John Milton's incessantly, and haunted his house day by day. What discourses you there used he is too generous to remember: but, he never having in the least provoked you, it is inhumanely and inhospitably done to insult thus over his old age. I hope it will be a warning to all others, as it is to me, to avoid, I will not say such a Judas, but a man that creeps into all companies, to jeer, trepan, and betray them."

Marvel. No proof of the kind is necessary to my friend: and it was not always that your lordship looked down on him so magisterially in reprehension, or delivered a sentence from so commanding an elevation. I, who indeed am but a humble man, am apt to question my judgment where it differs from his. I am appalled by any supercilious glance at him, and disgusted by any austerity ill assorted with the generosity of his mind. When I consider what pure delight we have derived from it, what treasures of wisdom it has conveyed to us, I find him supremely worthy of my gratitude, love, and veneration: and the neglect in which I now discover him, leaves me only the more room for the free effusion of these

sentiments. How shallow in comparison is everything else around us, trickling and dimpling in the pleasure-grounds of our literature! If we are to build our summer-houses against ruined temples, let us at least abstain from ruining them for the purpose.

Parker. Nay, nay, Mr. Marvel! so much warmth is uncalled for.

Marvel. Is there anything offensive to your lordship in my expressions?

Parker. I am not aware that there is. But let us generalize a little for we are prone to be touchy and testy in favour of our intimates.

Marvel. I believe, my lord, this fault, or sin, or whatsoever it may be designated, is among the few that are wearing fast away.

Parker. Delighted am I, my dear sir, to join you in your innocent pleasantry. But, truly and seriously, I have known even the prudent grow warm and stickle about some close affinity.

Marvel. Indeed? so indecorous before your lordship?

Parker. We may remember when manners were less polite than they are now; and not only the seasons of life require an alteration of habits, but likewise the changes of society.

Marvel. Your lordship acts up to your tenets. Parker. Perhaps you may blame me, and more severely than I would blame our worthy friend Mr. John Milton, upon finding a slight variation in my exterior manner, and somewhat more reserve than formerly: yet wiser and better men than I presume to call myself, have complied with the situation to which it hath pleased the Almighty to exalt them.

and such only as the vulgar are accustomed to handle, must we disbelieve the existence of any greater in its capacity, or decline the use of it in things lawful and commendable? Little men like these have no business at all with the mensuration of higher minds: gaugers are not astronomers.

Parker. Really, Mr. Marvel, I do not understand metaphors.

Marvel. Leaving out arithmetic and mathematics, and the sciences appertaining to them, I never opened a page without one; no, not even a title-page with a dozen words in it. Perhaps I am unfortunate in my tropes and figures: perhaps they come, by my want of dexterity, too near your lordship. I would humbly ask, is there any criminality in the calculation and casting up of manifold benefits, or in the employment of those instruments by which alone they are to be calcu lated and cast up?

Parker. Surely none whatever.

Marvel. It has happened to me and my schoolfellows, that catching small fish in the shallows and ditches of the Humber, we called a minnow a perch, and a dace a pike; because they pleased us in the catching, and because we really were ignorant of their quality. In like manner do some older ones act in regard to men. They who are caught and handled by them are treated with distinction, because they are so caught and handled, and because self-love and self-conceit dazzle and delude the senses; while those whom they neither can handle nor catch are without a distinctive name. We are informed by Aristoteles, in his Treatise on Natural History, that solid Marvel. I am slow to censure anyone for horns are dropt and that hollow ones are perassuming an air and demeanour which, he is permanent. Now, although we may find solid men suaded, are more becoming than what he has left cast on the earth and hollow men exalted, yet off. And I subscribe to the justice of the observa- never will I believe in the long duration of the tion, that wiser and better men than your lord-hollow, or in the long abasement of the solid. ship have adapted their language and their looks to elevated station. But sympathy is charity, or engenders it and sympathy requires proximity, closeness, contact: and at every remove, and more especially at every gradation of ascent, it grows a little colder. When we begin to call a man our worthy friend, our friendship is already on the wane. In him who has been raised above his old companions, there seldom remains more warmth than what turns everything about it vapid: familiarity sidles toward affability, and kindness eurtseys into condescension.

Parker. I see, we are hated for rising. Marvel. Many do really hate others for rising: but some who appear to hate them for it, hate them only for the bad effects it produces on the character.

Parker. We are odious, I am afraid, sometimes for the gift, and sometimes for the giver: and Malevolence cools her throbs by running to the obscurity of neglected merit. We know whose merit that means.

Marvel. What! because the servants of a king have stamped no measure above a certain compass,

Milton, although the generality may be ignorant of it, is quite as great a genius as Bacon, bating the chancellorship, which goes for little where a great man is estimated by a wise one.

Parker. Rather enthusiastic! ay, Mr. Marvel! the one name having been established for almost a century, the other but recently brought forward, and but partially acknowledged. By coming so much later into the world, he can not be quite so original in his notions as Lord Verulam.

Marvel. Solomon said that, even in his time, there was nothing new under the sun he said it unwisely and untruly.

Parker. Solomon? untruly? unwisely?

Marvel. The spectacles, which by the start you gave, had so nearly fallen from the bridge of your nose, attest it. Had he any? It is said, and apparently with more reason than formerly, that there are no new thoughts. What do the fools mean who say it? They might just as well assert that there are no new men, because other men existed before, with eyes, mouth, nostrils, chin, and many other appurtenances. But as there are myriads of forms between the forms of Scarron

Marvel. Until Milton touched it again with fire from heaven.

and Hudson* on one side, and of Mercury and | want of reasoning, some for want of memory, and Apollo on the other, so there are myriads of some for want of care. But there are certain thoughts, of the same genus, each taking its words which ceased to be spelt properly just peculiar conformation. Eschylus and Racine, before his time: the substantives, childe and struck by the same idea, would express a sen- wilde, and the verbs finde and winde, for instance. timent very differently. Do not imagine that Parker. Therein we agree. We ought never the idea is the thought: the idea is that which to have deviated from those who delivered to the thought generates, rears up to maturity, and us our Litany, of which the purity is unapcalls after its own name. Every note in music proachable and the harmony complete. Our has been sounded frequently; yet a composition tongue has been drooping ever since. of Purcell may be brilliant by its novelty. There are extremely few roots in a language; yet the language may be varied, and novel too, age after age. Chess-boards and numerals are less capable of exhibiting new combinations than poetry; and prose likewise is equally capable of displaying new phases and phenomenons in images and reflections. Good prose, to say nothing of the original thoughts it conveys, may be infinitely varied in modulation. It is only an extension of metres, an amplification of harmonies, of which even the best and most varied poetry admits but few. Comprehending at once the prose and poetry of Milton, we could prove, before "fit audience," that he is incomparably the greatest master of harmony that ever lived.

There may be, even in these late days, more originality of thought, and flowing in more channels of harmony, more bursts and breaks and sinuosities, than we have yet discovered.

The admirers of Homer never dreamt that a man more pathetic, more sublime, more thoughtful, more imaginative, would follow.

Parker. Certainly not.

Marvel. Yet Shakspeare came, in the memory of our fathers.

Parker. Mr. William Shakspeare of Stratford upon Avon? A remarkably clever man: nobody denies it.

Marvel. At first people did not know very well what to make of him. He looked odd: he seemed witty; he drew tears. But a grin and a pinch of snuff can do that.

Every great author is a great reformer; and the reform is either in thought or language. Milton is zealous and effective in both.

Parker. Some men conceive that, if their name is engraven in Gothic letters, it signifies and manifests antiquity of family; and others, that a congestion of queer words and dry chopt sentences, which turn the mouth awry in reading, make them look like original thinkers. I have seen fantastical folks of this description who write wend instead of go, and are so ignorant of grammar as even to put wended for went. I do not say that Mr. Milton is one of them; but he may have led weak men into the fault.

Marvel. Not only is he not one of them, but his language is never a patchwork of old and new: all is of a piece. Beside, he is the only writer whom it is safe to follow in spelling: others are inconsistent; some for want of learning, some for

* A dwarf in that age.

Parker. Gentlemen seem now to have delegated the correction of the press to their valets, and the valets to have devolved it on the chambermaids. But I would not advise you to start a fresh reformation in this quarter; for the round-heads can't spell, and the royalists won't: and if you bring back an ancient form retaining all its beauty, they will come forward from both sides against you on a charge of coining. We will now return, if you please, to the poets we were speaking of. Both Mr. Shakspeare and Mr. Milton have considerable merit in their respective ways; but both surely are unequal. Is it not so, Mr. Marvel?

Marvel. Under the highest of their immeasurable Alps, all is not valley and verdure: in some places there are frothy cataracts, there are the fruitless beds of noisy torrents, and there are dull and hollow glaciers. He must be a bad writer, or however a very indifferent one, in whom there are no inequalities. The plants of such table-land are diminutive, and never worth gathering. What would you think of a man's eyes to which all things appear of the same magnitude and at the same elevation? You must think nearly so of a writer who makes as much of small things as of great. The vigorous mind has mountains to climb and valleys to repose in. Is there any sea without its shoals? On that which the poet navigates, he rises intrepidly as the waves rise round him, and sits composedly as they subside.

Parker. I can listen to this: but where the authority of Solomon is questioned and rejected, I must avoid the topic. Pardon me; I collect from what you threw out previously, that, with strange attachments and strange aversions, you cherish singular ideas about greatness.

Marvel. To pretermit all reference to myself; our evil humours, and our good ones too, are brought out whimsically. We are displeased by him who would be similar to us, or who would be near, unless he consent to walk behind. To-day we are unfriendly to a man of genius, whom ten days hence we shall be zealous in extolling; not because we know anything more of his works or his character, but because we have dined in his company and he has desired to be introduced to us. A flat ceiling seems to compress those animosities which flame out furiously under the open sky.

Parker. Sad prejudices! sad infirmities!

Marvel. The sadder are opposite to them. Usually men, in distributing fame, do as old