We wish, however, to avail ourselves of the interest, transient as it may be, which this work has excited.  The dexterous Capuchins never choose to preach on the life and miracles of a saint till they have awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors by exhibiting some relic of him—­a thread of his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his blood.  On the same principle, we intend to take advantage of the late interesting discovery, and, while this memorial of a great and good man is still in the hands of all, to say something of his moral and intellectual qualities.  Nor, we are convinced, will the severest of our readers blame us if, on an occasion like the present, we turn for a short time from the topics of the day to commemorate, in all love and reverence, the genius and virtues of John Milton, the poet, the statesman, the philosopher, the glory of English literature, the champion and the martyr of English liberty.

It is by his poetry that Milton is best known; and it is of his poetry that we wish first to speak.  By the general suffrage of the civilized world, his place has been assigned among the greatest masters of the art.  His detractors, however, though outvoted, have not been silenced.  There are many critics, and some of great name, who contrive in the same breath to extol the poems and to decry the poet.  The works, they acknowledge, considered in themselves, may be classed among the noblest productions of the human mind.  But they will not allow the author to rank with those great men who, born in the infancy of civilization, supplied, by their own powers, the want of instruction, and, though destitute of models themselves, bequeathed to posterity models which defy imitation.  Milton, it is said, inherited what his predecessors created; he lived in an enlightened age; he received a finished education; and we must therefore, if we would form a just estimate of his powers, make large deductions in consideration of these advantages.

We venture to say, on the contrary, paradoxical as the remark may appear, that no poet has ever had to struggle with more unfavorable circumstances than Milton.  He doubted, as he has himself owned, whether he had not been born “an age too late.”  For this notion Johnson has thought fit to make him the butt of much clumsy ridicule.  The poet, we believe, understood the nature of his art better than the critic.  He knew that his poetical genius derived no advantage from the civilization which surrounded him, or from the learning which he had acquired; and he looked back with something like regret to the ruder age of simple words and vivid impressions.

We think that, as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.  Therefore, though we fervently admire those great works of imagination which have appeared in dark ages, we do not admire them the more because they have appeared in dark ages.  On the contrary, we hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.  We cannot understand why those who believe in that most orthodox article of literary faith, that the earliest poets are generally the best, should wonder at the rule as if it were the exception.  Surely the uniformity of the phenomenon indicates a corresponding uniformity in the cause.