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giving such a shock to their understandings, as might break the charm, 

 which it was his object to throw over their imaginations." "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 philoso- 

 phically in the wrong, we cannot but believe that he was poetically in 

 the right." Such is (or was ?) the opinion of Macaulay — no mean poet 

 himself. I regret that I cannot agree with him. He has taken up a 

 bad cause to plead for, and his arguments cannot mend his case. 

 The truth is, they savour much of sophisms. 



It is no use trying to reconcile things irreconcilable. A line cannot 

 be straight and curved at the same time, nor can a being be corporeal and 

 non-corporeal, or spiritual and non-spiritual. We are, as human beings, 

 partly spiritual and partly corporeal, but we cannot drop either spirit 

 or body as we please, nor can we realise the angels of Milton as gifted 

 with that power. I am utterly uiiable to see what Milton has gained 

 poetically by the sacrifice of philosophical consistency. It is true, that 

 the enjoyment of poetry requires a certain degree of madness both in 

 author and reader ; but if there is not method in the madness, no enjoy- 

 ment is possible; if our reason is constantly outraged or puzzled, w^e 

 may be surprised or bewildered, but we can never be pleased. 



I will not maintain, that it was possible for Milton, as Dr. Johnson 

 thought, " to keep immateriality out of sight and to seduce the reader 

 to drop it from his thought." Not only the philosophers and theolo- 

 gians of the seventeenth century, but no enlightened Christian public of 

 any age or country, would allow any poet so much license on this point, 

 as Homer could indulge in, availing himself to the full of the poetic 

 elements of an anthropomorphic polytheism, much less possible was it 

 to support a nari'ative by purely spiritual agents. The poet was in a 

 dilemma, in which failure was unavoidable ; he is therefore not re- 

 sponsible for this failure, e.wept in so much as it was the consequence 

 of his choice of subject. This choice once made, more on philosophical 

 and religious, than on poetic grounds ; the poet grappled boldly and 

 struggled manfully with the formidable difficulties it presented ; he had 

 that spirit, charcteristic of bold and haughty tempers, which challenges 

 attack by working out a thesis to its most startling consequences. He 

 was none of those who are af)-aid of the results of their own theories ; 

 he disdained to veil in mystic argument the asperities of his doctrines ; 

 he took particular pains in stating unmistakably what was his honest 



