alchemist's crucible. Wit that to nonsense nearly is allied, if the thin
partitions are not often actually broken down. Where you should have the
living blood that flows through the living heart--the affections, the
passions, and the actions that mould man and his world--you find sporting
and rejoicing in their own elastic vigour, their adroitness and buoyancy,
and in their wonderful starts and capricious bounds, aimless flights and
aerial gambols--the bold, the keen, the nimble, the strenuous faculties,
summoned together to compose the masculine, ranging, intrepid, various,
piercing, and comprehensive INTELLECT--long the acknowledged
sovereign-master of that high literature, which Milton had now left, and
which Pope did not yet occupy.

Dryden dealt in the same incomprehensible way with Milton as with
Shakspeare. In that famous falsifying epigram, the poet of _Paradise Lost_
is greater than Homer and Virgil rolled into one; and his name is
frequently mentioned with seeming reverence in those off-hand Prefaces.
Yet even in such critical passages there is no just approbation of his
genius. Thus, in the preface to "The State of Innocence," he says--"The
original being undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble, and most
sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced." _This age!
One of the greatest_, &c.! The age of Charles II.! And what has become of
the _other_ great, noble, and sublime, poems which that age has produced?
These wavering words were written the year Milton died; and Dennis, or
some one else, tells us that, twenty years after, Dryden confessed that he
had not then been sensible of half the extent of his excellence. But what,
twenty years after, does he say?--

"As for Mr Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his
subject is not of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is
the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous like that of
all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and human
persons are but two. But I will not take Mr Rhymer's work out of his
hands; he has promised the world a critique on that author, wherein,
though he will not allow his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us
that his thoughts are elevated, his words sounding, and that no man
has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated
his Grecisms, and the Latin elegancies of Virgil. It is true he runs
into a fl