very cheerfully,
admits. Those who at the opening of the seventeenth century fought in
literature, in the council-chamber, in the field, against the Church
revival of their day, may be counted among worthies and benefactors.
'But for all this, it remains true, that in the intellectual sphere
grasp and mastery are incompatible with the exigencies of a struggle.'

The reader will hardly retain gravity of feature before the
self-indulgent, self-deceiving sophistication of a canon, which actually
excludes from grasp and mastery in the intellectual sphere Dante,
Milton, and Burke. Pattison repeats in his closing pages his lamentable
refrain that the author of _Paradise Lost_ should have forsaken poetry
for more than twenty years 'for a noisy pamphlet brawl, and the unworthy
drudgery of Secretary to the Council Board' (p. 332). He had said the
same thing in twenty places in his book on Milton. He transcribes
unmoved the great poet's account of his own state of mind, after the
physicians had warned him that if he persisted in using his remaining
eye for his pamphlet, he would lose that too. 'The choice lay before
me,' says Milton, 'between dereliction of a supreme duty and loss of
eyesight: in such a case I could not listen to the physician, not if
AEsculapius himself had spoken from his sanctuary. I could not but obey
that inward monitor, I knew not what, that spake to me from heaven. I
considered with myself that many had purchased less good with worse ill,
as they who give their lives to reap only glory, and I therefore
concluded to employ the little remaining eyesight I was to enjoy in
doing this, the greatest service to the common weal it was in my power
to render.' And so he wrote the _Second Defence_, and yet lived long
enough, and preserved sublimity of imagination enough, to write the
_Paradise Lost_ as well. Mr. Goldwin Smith goes nearer the mark than the
Rector when he insists that 'the tension and elevation which Milton's
nature had undergone in the mighty struggle, together with the heroic
dedication of his faculties to the most serious objects, must have had
not a little to do both with the final choice of his subject and with
the tone of his poem. "The great Puritan epic" could hardly have been
written by any one but a militant Puritan' (_Lectures and Essays_, p.
324). In the last page of his _Memoirs_, Pattison taxes the poet with
being carried away by the aims of 'a party whose aims he idealised.' As
if the hi