than sixty years ago since Mr. Carlyle took occasion to
observe, in his Life of Schiller, that, except the Newgate Calendar,
there was no more sickening reading than the biographies of authors.

Allowing for the vivacity of the comparison, and only remarking, with
reference to the Newgate Calendar, that its compilers have usually been
very inferior wits, in fact attorneys, it must be owned that great
creative and inventive genius, the most brilliant gifts of bright fancy
and happy expression, and a glorious imagination, well-nigh seeming as if
it must be inspired, have too often been found most unsuitably lodged in
ill-living and scandalous mortals. Though few things, even in what is
called Literature, are more disgusting than to hear small critics, who
earn their bite and sup by acting as the self-appointed showmen of the
works of their betters, heaping terms of moral opprobrium upon those
whose genius is, if not exactly a lamp unto our feet, at all events a joy
to our hearts,--still, not even genius can repeal the Decalogue, or re-
write the sentence of doom, 'He which is filthy, let him be filthy
still.' It is therefore permissible to wish that some of our great
authors had been better men.

It is possible to dislike John Milton. Men have been found able to do
so, and women too; amongst these latter his daughters, or one of them at
least, must even be included. But there is nothing sickening about his
biography, for it is the life of one who early consecrated himself to the
service of the highest Muses, who took labour and intent study as his
portion, who aspired himself to be a noble poem, who, Republican though
he became, is what Carlyle called him, the moral king of English
literature.

Milton was born in Bread Street, Cheapside, on the 9th of December, 1608.
This is most satisfactory, though indeed what might have been expected.
There is a notable disposition nowadays, amongst the meaner-minded
provincials, to carp and gird at the claims of London to be considered
the mother-city of the Anglo-Saxon race, to regret her pre-eminence, and
sneer at her fame. In the matters of municipal government, gas, water,
fog, and snow, much can be alleged and proved against the English
capital, but in the domain of poetry, which I take to be a nation's best
guaranteed stock, it may safely be said that there are but two shrines in
England whither it is necessary for the literary pilgrim to carry his
cockle hat and shoon--L