The excerpt which comes next in this Miscellany links with the name of the author of the Essay of Dramatic Poesy the name of the most illustrious of his contemporaries.  The difference, indeed, between Milton and Dryden is a difference not in degree merely, but in kind, so immeasurably distant and alien is the sphere in which they moved and worked both as men and as writers.  It has sometimes been questioned whether Dryden is a poet.  Few would dispute that Milton divides with Shakespeare the supremacy in English poetry.  In Dryden as a man there is little to attract or interest us.  In character and in private life he appears to have been perfectly commonplace.  We close his biography, and our curiosity is satisfied.  With Milton it is far otherwise.  We feel instinctively that he belongs to the demi-gods of our race.  We have the same curiosity about him as we have about Homer, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare, so that the merest trifles which throw any light on his personality assume an interest altogether out of proportion to their intrinsic importance.  Our debt to Ellwood is, it must be admitted, much less than it might have been, if he had thought a little more of Milton and a little less of his somewhat stupid self and the sect to which he belonged.  But, as the proverb says, we must not look a gift-horse in the mouth, and we are the richer for the Quaker’s reminiscences.  With Ellwood’s work, the History of Thomas Ellwood, written by Himself, we are only concerned so far as it bears on his relation with Milton.  Born in 1639, the son of a small squire and justice of the peace at Crowell in Oxfordshire, Ellwood had, in 1659, been persuaded by Edward Burrough, one of the most distinguished of Fox’s followers, to join the Quakers.  He was in his twenty-fourth year when he first met Milton.  Milton was then living in Jewin Street, having removed from his former lodging in Holborn, most probably in the autumn of 1661.  The restoration had terminated his work as a controversialist and politician.  For a short time his life had been in peril, but he had received a pardon, and could at least live in peace.  He could no longer be of service as a patriot, and was now occupied with the composition of Paradise Lost.  Since 1650 he had been blind, and for study and recreation was dependent on assistance.  Having little domestic comfort as a widower, he had just married his third wife.

Ellwood’s narrative tells its own story.  What especially strikes us in it, and what makes it particularly interesting, is that it presents Milton in a light in which he is not presented elsewhere.  Ellwood seems to have had the same attraction for him as Bonstetten had for Gray.  No doubt the simplicity, freshness, and enthusiasm of the young Quaker touched and interested the lonely and world-wearied poet who, when Ellwood first met him, had entered on his fifty-fifth year; he had no doubt, too, the scholar’s sympathy with a disinterested love