L’Allegro.  A Poem.

By JOHN MILTON.

No Printer’s name.

It has become a practice of late with a certain description of people, who have no visible means of subsistence, to string together a few trite images of rural scenery, interspersed with vulgarisms in dialect, and traits of vulgar manners; to dress up these materials in a Sing-Song jingle; and to offer them for sale as a Poem.  According to the most approved recipes, something about the heathen gods and goddesses; and the schoolboy topics of Styx and Cerberus, and Elysium; are occasionally thrown in, and the composition is complete.  The stock in trade of these Adventurers is in general scanty enough; and their Art therefore consists in disposing it to the best advantage.  But if such be the aim of the Writer, it is the Critic’s business to detect and defeat the imposture; to warn the public against the purchase of shop-worn goods and tinsel wares; to protect the fair trader, by exposing the tricks of needy Quacks and Mountebanks; and to chastise that forward and noisy importunity with which they present themselves to the public notice.

How far Mr. MILTON is amenable to this discipline, will best appear from a brief analysis of the Poem before us.

In the very opening he assumes a tone of authority which might better suit some veteran Bard than a raw candidate for the Delphic bays:  for, before he proceeds to the regular process of Invocation, he clears the way, by driving from his presence (with sundry hard names; and bitter reproaches on her father, mother, and all the family) a venerable Personage, whose age at least and staid matron-like appearance, might have entitled her to more civil language.

    Hence, loathed Melancholy! 
    Of CERBERUS and blackest Midnight born,
    In Stygian cave forlorn, &c.

There is no giving rules, however, in these matters, without a knowledge of the case.  Perhaps the old lady had been frequently warned off before; and provoked this violence by continuing still to lurk about the Poet’s dwelling.  And, to say the truth, the Reader will have but too good reason to remark, before he gets through the Poem, that it is one thing to tell the Spirit of Dulness to depart; and another to get rid of her in reality.  Like GLENDOWER’s Spirits, any one may order them away; “but will they go, when you do order them?”

But let us suppose for a moment that the Parnassian decree is obeyed; and, according to the letter of the Order (which is as precise and wordy as if Justice SHALLOW himself had drawn it) that the obnoxious female is sent back to the place of her birth,

    ’Mongst horrid shapes, shrieks, sights, &c.

At which we beg our fair readers not to be alarmed; for we can assure them they are only words of course in all poetical Instruments of this nature, and mean no more than the “force and arms” and “instigation of the Devil” in a common Indictment.