than his glorious "candour," his "courtesy," (surpassing that of Sir Gawain,) and his truly "enlightened" understanding. Indeed, we very much question whether a writer, who carries with him a just feeling of his allegiance—a truly loyal writer—can lawfully suppose his sovereign, the reader, peccable or capable of error; and whether there is not even a shade of impiety in conceiving him liable to the affections of sleep, or of yawning.
Having thus, upon our knees as it were, done feudal homage to our great suzerain, the reader—having propitiated him with Persian adorations and with Phrygian genuflexions, let us now crave leave to convert him a little. Convert him!—that sounds "un peu fort," does it not? No, not at all. A cat may look at a king; and upon this or that out-of-the-way point a writer may presume to be more knowing than his reader—the serf may undertake to convert his lord. The reader is a great being—a great noun-substantive; but still, like a mere adjective, he is liable to the three degrees of comparison. He may rise above himself—he may transcend the ordinary level of readers, however exalted that level be. Being great, he may become greater. Full of light, he may yet labour with a spot or two of darkness. And such a spot we hold the prevalent opinion upon Milton in two particular questions of taste—questions that are not insulated, but diffusive; spreading themselves over the entire surface of the Paradise Lost, and also of the Paradise Regained; insomuch that, if Milton is wrong once, then he is wrong by many scores of times. Nay, which transcends all counting of cases or numerical estimates of error, if, in the separate instances, (be they few or be they many,) he is truly and indeed wrong—then he has erred, not by the case but by the principle; and that is a thousand times worse; for a separate case or instance of error may escape any man—may have been overlooked amongst the press of objects crowding on his eye; or, if not overlooked, if passed deliberately, may plead the ordinary privilege of human frailty. The man erred; and his error terminates in itself. But an error of principle does not terminate in itself; it is a fountain; it is self-diffusive; and it has a life of its own. The faults of a great man are in any case contagious; they are dazzling and delusive by means of the great man's general example. But his false principles have a worse contagion. They operate not only through the general haze and halo which invests a shining example; but even if transplanted where that example is unknown, they propagate themselves by the vitality inherent in all self-consistent principles, whether true or false.
Before we notice these two cases in Milton, first of all let us ask—Who and what is Milton? Dr Johnson was furiously incensed with a certain man, by trade an author and manufacturer of books wholesale and retail, for introducing Milton's name into a certain index thus—"Milton, Mr John." That Mister, undoubtedly, was hard to digest. Yet very often it happens to the best of us—to men who are far enough from "thinking small beer of themselves,"—that about ten o'clock a.m., an official big-wig, sitting at Bow Street, calls upon the man to account for his sprees of the last night, for his feats in knocking down lamp-posts and extinguishing watchmen, by this ugly demand of—"Who and what are you, sir?" And perhaps the poor man, sick and penitential for want of soda water, really finds a considerable difficulty in replying satisfactorily to the worthy beek's apostrophe. Although, at five o'clock in the evening, should the culprit be returning into the country in the same coach as his awful interrogator, he might be very apt to look fierce, and retort this amiable enquiry, and with equal thirst for knowledge to demand, "D your eyes, if you come to that, who and what are you?" And the beek in his turn, though so apt to indulge his own curiosity at the expense of the public, might find it very difficult to satisfy that of others.
The same thing happens to authors; and to great authors beyond all others. So accustomed are we to survey a great man through the cloud of years that has gathered round him—so impossible is it to detach him from the pomp and equipage of all who have quoted him, copied him, echoed him, lectured about him, disputed about him, quarreled about him, that in the case of any Anacharsis the Scythian coming amongst us—any savage, that is to say, uninstructed in our literature,
