was blended with that of religion.  Reformers have often made a stand against these feelings; but never with more than apparent and partial success.  The men who demolished the images in cathedrals have not always been able to demolish those which were enshrined in their minds.  It would not be difficult to show that in politics the same rule holds good.  Doctrines, we are afraid, must generally be embodied before they can excite a strong public feeling.  The multitude is more easily interested for the most unmeaning badge, or the most insignificant name, than for the most important principle.

From these considerations, we infer that no poet who should affect that metaphysical accuracy for the want of which Milton has been blamed would escape a disgraceful failure.  Still, however, there was another extreme which, though far less dangerous, was also to be avoided.  The imaginations of men are in a great measure under the control of their opinions.  The most exquisite art of poetical coloring can produce no illusion when it is employed to represent that which is at once perceived to be incongruous and absurd.  Milton wrote in an age of philosophers and theologians.  It was necessary, therefore, for him to abstain from giving such a shock to their understandings as might break the charm which it was his object to throw over their imaginations.  This is the real explanation of the indistinctness and inconsistency with which he has often been reproached.  Dr. Johnson acknowledges that it was absolutely necessary that the spirit should be clothed with material forms.  “But,” says he, “the poet should have secured the consistency of his system by keeping immateriality out of sight, and seducing the reader to drop it from his thoughts.”  This is easily said; but what if Milton could not seduce his readers to drop immateriality from their thoughts?  What if the contrary opinion had taken so full a possession of the minds of men as to leave no room even for the half-belief which poetry requires?  Such we suspect to have been the case.  It was impossible for the poet to adopt altogether the material or the immaterial system.  He therefore took his stand on the debatable ground.  He left the whole in ambiguity.  He has doubtless, by so doing, laid himself open to the charge of inconsistency.  But, though philosophically in the wrong, we cannot but believe that he was poetically in the right.  This task, which almost any other writer would have found impracticable, was easy to him.  The peculiar art which he possessed of communicating his meaning circuitously through a long succession of associated ideas, and of intimating more than he expressed, enabled him to disguise those incongruities which he could not avoid.