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 work 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 Shakspeare; 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.[12]—­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, every where 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[13] 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, particularises 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.

The arts by which Pope, soon afterwards, contrived to procure to himself a more general and a higher reputation than perhaps any English Poet ever attained during his life-time, are known to the judicious.  And as well known is it to them, that the undue exertion of those arts is the cause why Pope has for some time held a rank in literature, to which, if he had not been seduced by an over-love of immediate popularity, and had confided more in his native genius, he never could have descended.