this promise, says best Sir Walter, "he never filled up
the measure of his presumption by attempting to fulfil." Milton running on
a flat of thought for a hundred lines together on a track of Scripture! In
his poem, by unnecessary coinage of new, and unnecessary revival of old
words, running into _affectation_! Milton not to be _justified_ for his
blank verse, no not even by the example of the illustrious and immortal
Hannibal Caro! Then he took to it in despair, for rhyme was not his
talent! His rhyme forced and constrained in the Hymn on the Nativity--in
Lycidas--in L'Allegro--in Il Penseroso!

In the same Essay on Satire--Dryden talks, not very intelligibly, about
"the _beautiful turns of words and thoughts_, which are as requisite in
this as in heroic poetry itself;" but with which he confesses himself to
have been unacquainted till about twenty years before, when "that noble
wit of Scotland," Sir George Mackenzie, asked him why he did not imitate
"_the turns_ of Mr Waller and Sir John Denham, of which he repeated many
to me." The memory of that "noble wit of Scotland" is far from being
honoured--nay, it is execrated by his countrymen--by the common people we
mean--and, in the long run, they are no bad judges of merit. He was, we
believe, no great shakes as a lawyer, either within or without the bar;
and, like many other well-born, weak-minded men, had a taste for elegant
literature and vulgar blood. Of his "voluminous works, historical and
juridical," we know less than nothing; but his "Essays on several moral
subjects," have more than once fallen out of our hands. Sir Walter says,
"he was an accomplished scholar, of lively talents, and ready elocution,
and very well deserved the appellation of a 'noble wit of Scotland.'" "The
Bluidy Mackenyie," reciting to Dryden many "beautiful turns" from Waller
and Denham--and Dryden calling the poetasters "those two fathers of our
English poetry," in the same page where he is writing of Milton! At Sir
George's behest, in Cowley, even in his "Davideis," an heroic poem, he
sought in vain for "elegant turns, either on the word or on the thought;"
and his search was equally fruitless in the "Paradise Lost"--for, as
Milton "endeavours every where to express Homer, whose age had not yet
arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty thoughts,
which were clothed with admirable Grecisms, and ancient words which he had
been digging from the mines of Chaucer and Spenser;