same date. The Poems of Norris of Bemerton not
long after went, I believe, through nine editions.
What further demand there might be for these works
I do not know; but I well remember that, twenty-five
years ago, the booksellers’ stalls in London
swarmed with the folios of Cowley. This is not
mentioned in disparagement of that able writer and
amiable man; but merely to show that, if Milton’s
Works were not more read, it was not because readers
did not exist at the time. The early editions
of the
Paradise Lost were printed in a shape
which allowed them to be sold at a low price, yet
only three thousand copies of the Work were sold in
eleven years; and the Nation, says Dr. Johnson, had
been satisfied from 1623 to 1664, that is, forty-one
years, with only two editions of the Works of Shakespeare;
which probably did not together make one thousand Copies;
facts adduced by the critic to prove the ’paucity
of Readers,’—There were readers in
multitudes; but their money went for other purposes,
as their admiration was fixed elsewhere. We are
authorized, then, to affirm that the reception of
the
Paradise Lost, and the slow progress of
its fame, are proofs as striking as can be desired
that the positions which I am attempting to establish
are not erroneous.[7]—How amusing to shape
to one’s self such a critique as a Wit of Charles’s
days, or a Lord of the Miscellanies or trading Journalist
of King William’s time, would have brought forth,
if he had set his faculties industriously to work
upon this Poem, everywhere impregnated with
original
excellence.
So strange indeed are the obliquities of admiration,
that they whose opinions are much influenced by authority
will often be tempted to think that there are no fixed
principles[8] in human nature for this art to rest
upon. I have been honoured by being permitted
to peruse in MS. a tract composed between the period
of the Revolution and the close of that century.
It is the Work of an English Peer of high accomplishments,
its object to form the character and direct the studies
of his son. Perhaps nowhere does a more beautiful
treatise of the kind exist. The good sense and
wisdom of the thoughts, the delicacy of the feelings,
and the charm of the style, are, throughout, equally
conspicuous. Yet the Author, selecting among the
Poets of his own country those whom he deems most
worthy of his son’s perusal, particularizes
only Lord Rochester, Sir John Denham, and Cowley.
Writing about the same time, Shaftesbury, an author
at present unjustly depreciated, describes the English
Muses as only yet lisping in their cradles.