Milton's object was not that which would have been Shakspeare's,
namely, to depict nature. That he was able to have given the lady
a more feminine cast of character is evident, from his description of
Eve, who never assumes a masculine port or language. He had be-
fore him all our dramatic writers of the Elizabethan age, by whom the
female character had been drawn in its utmost perfection and in every
variety. It was not to be presumed, therefore, that the character he
has exhibited is any other than he intended it should appear in the
representative of chastity, cold, masculine, and severe, as Diana her-
self is depicted. The mind of Milton, too, was always aiming at ob-
jects beyond the earth. He looked into more awful regions for the
themes of his verse, and aspired to delineate gods rather than men,
while he ever sought to make men soar above their frail natures and to
be as gods. However unfortunate it may be considered, therefore, that
the personification of chastity in Comus is not more of the woman, and
however much it lessens the dramatic effect of the poem, it could have
been given no other way with the view Milton took of his subject.
Moreover, the public taste in his day was far from rejecting characters,
which in ours are so frigid in the exhibition. He regarded the proba-
bility of the scene much less than the moral and composition; his was
a world of ideality; he had the promotion of virtue rather than the ex-
hibition of human passion before his eye, and he made every thing sub-
mit to that object. This was the practice of some of our best poets. In
Spenser, nature is subservient to the allegory and moral of the poetry.
It was often the fashion of antiquity to do this, and Milton may readily
'stand excused for following preceding examples. Shakspeare endea-
voured both to inculcate virtue and delineate man as he is, and he suc
ceeded; but it may be very justly doubted whether the moral of his
pieces be not commonly lost on an audience in the interest excited by
the events and actions of his characters, which being those of every
man's "business and bosom" attract all the attention, and effectually
conceal the moral from sight. Milton made the moral every where so
apparent, as to convince the reader immediately that all contingencies
must tend to the one great object; he was, therefore, not formed for
a dramatic writer of our times, but might have been a tragedian of an-
cient Greece. He had his eye directed to higher and purer objects.
He avoided a minute delineation of vice altogether. Comus is the
only vicious character in the poem; his vices are sensual, but their
details are veiled from the sight: we have no disgusting picture of
profligacy, no exhibition of crime varnished with, sentiment, giving
sin a venial aspect, and arresting detestation by arousing sympathy.
All is in unison with the poet's severe intention. The lady could not
have been drawn with the tenderness and softness of the sex, and have
displayed sufficient knowledge to have resisted the arguments of the
enchanter by reason as well as by the dictates of virtue. Her know-
ingness may operate against our being touched with her situation, but
it speaks the loftiness of the poet's views. Like the attendant spirit,
his business was with those only who aspired

To lay their just hands on that golden key
That opes the palace of eternity,-

not with those who wished to see a picture of the vices of the world. Milton, had he consulted only nature and probability, would not have

made the lady sing the song of "Sweet Echo," when lost in the recesses of a wood at midnight. She would rather have sought safety by concealment, than excited attention by singing; and if she were alarmed, terror might incite shrieks and "frantic fear," but would not allow her to try her vocal skill in such an exquisite song. I dwell thus long on the lady's character, because it seems at first view most obnoxious to censure of any in the poem, while in reality, with the peculiar object of the author, it is not so. Comus, considered as a vehicle for music, cannot be impugned. Never were the sister arts more charmingly united than in the performance of it, and one can only fear that Milton's genius might have been fettered in so adapting it, though but for this peculiar use the world would never have seen it. Masques and dramatic poems written for music are, after all, unsatisfactory. They may contain fine passages and delightful songs, but the poetry is lost during the representation. Then nature, pathos, and sentiment, are rarely to be discovered in them. The musician, singer, or rather chanter, destroys all the better associations that the finest passages would produce, by the very circumstance of singing them. A drama so exhibited has rarely, in our language at least, produced sublime impressions.' This cannot be said of an Ode, like Alexander's Feast, for example, or of any single narrative or invocatory poem or song. The truth of this is incontestable, and is founded in nature, for no two persons could discourse in verse, in common life, without exciting laughter. Songs may be introduced into dramatic pieces, and sung with effect; but chanted dialogues, except in burlesque writings, will be rejected when a pure taste shall govern the stage. In the present case, however, part was intended to be sung, and part to be spoken.

As to the poetry of Comus, it is impossible to be fatigued with it; it is the "cordial julep" of the enchanter himself,

That flames and dances in his crystal bounds

With spirits of balm and fragrant syrups mixed.

It is not generally known, that the following exquisite lines in the speech of the attendant spirit ought to be printed after the fourth line. from the commencement of the speech-" In regions mild of calm and serene air,"

Amid th' Hesperian gardens, on whose banks,
Bedewed with nectar and celestial songs,
Eternal roses grow, and hyacinth,

And fruits of golden rinde, on whose fair tree
The scaly harness'd dragon ever keeps
His unenchanted eye around the verge
And sacred limits of this blissful isle,
The jealous ocean, that old river, winds
His far-extended arms, till with steep fall
Half his waste flood the wild Atlantic fills,
And half the slow unfathomed Stygian pool-
But soft, I was not sent to court your wonder
With distant worlds, and strange removed climes :

Yet thence I come, and oft from thence behold, &c.

The Editor begs not to be held responsible for this sentiment of the writer, though he does not choose to mar the paper by blotting it out.-Has he ever read Metastasio?

How delicious is the address of the enchanter inviting to pleasure. It is Anacreon all over,

Braiding his locks with rosy twine,

Dropping odours, dropping wine.

The sophistry mingled with voluptuousness, in the address of Comus to the lady, is so subtly administered, that innocent virgins of the common race would, under such circumstances, never have unravelled it. Every sophism is a sophism only in present application; as when Comus asks:

Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth
With such a full and unwithdrawing hand,
Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks;
Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable,
But all to please and sate the curious taste?

And where he says:

Beauty is nature's coin, must not be hoarded,
But must be current, and the good thereof
Consists in mutual and partaken bliss,
Unsavoury in th' enjoyment of itself;

If you let slip time, like a neglected rose

It withers on the stock with languish'd head.

In a circumscribed sense this is virtue and reason; in an unlimited, sensuality and profligacy. Comus, it must be confessed, has the poetry, and the lady the metaphysics of the dialogue. This is against our better taste, and is an unfortunate result of the poet's design. The loveliest lips argue contrary to our accustomed associations, but this difficulty could not have been avoided unless the successful defence of the lady had resulted from the common armour of the sex-her tears and entreaties. But Milton sought to paint a heroine, in order that the virtuous doctrines he would inculcate might not be lost, or the force of the moral weakened. The majesty of chilling Chastity could not be so well vindicated in a very woman, whose empire is naturally, as Rousseau observes, "an empire of softness, of address, of complacency, whose menaces are tears." It is to be recollected, also, that Milton's ideas of the sex were hardly favourable enough to the supposition, that a lady of the common stamp would have resisted temptation in a situation where, if she but hesitated a moment, she must have been lost past redemption. The soliloquy of the lady makes up in a great degree for the dry philosophy of her arguments with Comus. What fine painting, affluence of imagery, and noble apostrophes, adorn her speech! almost every line of which may be applied in some way of illustration. The personifications of different virtues are among the most beautiful in our language; though by one school of modern poetry the use of these has been censured as unnatural. How sweet is the apostrophe:

O welcome pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope,
Thou hovering angel girt with golden wings-
And thou unblemish'd form of Chastity!

But I must not quote too much from that to which all may easily refer, nor give the fine descriptions of music, showing Milton's ardent love for the sister art, beginning, "How sweetly did they float, &c." and

"At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound, &c." perhaps the two finest descriptions of the effect of music in our own, or any other language.

The address of Comus to the lady affords in itself a clear proof, that Milton did not intend that the enchanter should work the lady to his will by arguments which would have prevailed with most of her sex. He did not need to be informed of the easiest way to a woman's heart, when Satan was to tempt Eve by flattery and "glozing" words. Comus uses false reasoning, artfully coloured to look like truth. There is no attempt to move the passions of his victim; the poet's object being clearly to operate by the nobler faculty of man, and abandon natural passion. Having invested his characters with something above human frailty, he carried them through their parts on the same elevation; an altitude congenial to the sublimity of his genius, that was soon after to lead him to still loftier heights. In this view most objections made to Comus fall to the ground. I am the more anxious to press the subject in this point, because the time when the influence of nature's truth has held its widest dominion, is in the present day, and it is more than ever necessary to do away from the works of our sublimest poet what may at first sight appear to run counter to nature, and to show, that what might have seemed to do so, in Comus in particular, was the result of his aspirations to tread in more exalted paths than other mortals. The world of Milton was wholly intellectual; his mind pried into unearthly mysteries; its contemplations were in other spheres-wild and gigantic. The usual characteristics of mortality were too common-place for his pictures; he sought to create as well as develope, to astonish as well as attract, to instruct as well as delight. His march was above humanity altogether; it was out of the track of human footsteps; and the scenes of earth only served him for comparisons by which to make intelligible the objects in his own limitless universe. Comus is surrounded with unearthliness; its poetry sustains this character in a way that, if the author did not intend should be the case, and it is probable he did not, speaks the bent of his genius, and the solitary grandeur in which it towers above all competitors for the laurel of immortality. It is redolent with images of passing excellence, simplicity, and beauty-"Leucothea's lovely hands”

"Thetis tinsel-slippered feet"-"Sabrina with chaste palms moist and cold;" and a hundred of those striking features, which image an original being to the imagination, without elaborating stature and complexion, buckle and clasp, casque, corslet, and robe, as is the fashion in more recent poetry :-it is the dash of a great artist's pencil, that gives the lineaments of the figure to the life, far more effectively than the finished and high-worked miniature. They must indeed be dead to the music of the sweetest song of the poet, who do not confess his power in Comus-whose feelings do not thrill with delight at its highly wrought passages, while its closing lines

Mortals that would follow me,
Love Virtue, she alone is free,
She can teach you how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or if Virtue feeble were,

Heaven itself would stoop to her

shew what I would most insist upon, that Milton's object in Comus

"

Plain Preaching.

229

was to personify virtue by characters superior to impulses prompted by common passion; and that with this object, he gave them an action inconsistent in a great degree with real life, bút in unison with the peculiar character of his genius-a measure, that while it effected his object, rendered the poem inferior in interest to one founded on human fallibility. For the purest of mankind only was Comus written, and it can only be enjoyed to the full extent of its excellencies by the " heart."

pure in

Y. J.

PLAIN PREACHING.

A PRIEST-not such as Hogarth drew
With paunch rotund and visage red,
And eyes that glistering like dew
Protruded fatly from his head-
Yet still with look canonical,

Though feminine as any Molly,
Prank'd out in dandihood withal

To the top pitch of fashion's folly:
Full to the throat of Greek and college,

And words 'twould break the jaw to speak 'em,
Though he at best could only squeak'em,
While doling forth his stock of knowledge :-
Asked to ascend a country rostrum,

And "hold forth" to the congregation;
Up-mounted to his proper station,
Carrying his black morocco nostrum

Fill'd with fine sentences omnigenous,
Words ne'er to man nor jay indigenous,
And moral axioms gleaned from heathen scribe,
Displayed his white hand decked with rings,
His cambric handkerchief, and things
That trap the eyes and hearts of lady-tribe.
He was the pink of parsons, essenced o'er
With nard and perfumes from a foreign shore.
He spoke of "theism," the "cosmogony"-
Of vice, that "autocrat pestiferous,"
Of" Hyperborean blasts frigoriferous,"
And how, "disjunct" from home and prog any,
The "boding fowls" the prophet fed,
While "scistose rocks" composed his bed.

The pulpit's owner was a man of worth

Who loved, as Vicars should, his congregation,

And well he knew no mortal power on earth

Could make it comprehend his friend's oration-
Zounds, thought he, college men in this our day
Are sadly gone from good old rules astray,

I'll ne'er ask Finnikin to preach again-
The farmers stare; even Miss Deborah Screw,
Through all the parish noted as a blue,"

66

To understand will find no little pain.
The service o'er, the Vicar freely spoke,
My brother Finnikin, it was no joke

For country folk to sit and hear your lecture