salem' was never intended for the stage, but it had a
great literary success. Murray, who had given only a hundred and fifty
guineas for 'Fazio,' gave five hundred for the 'Fall of Jerusalem,'
and he gave the same sum both for the 'Martyr of Antioch' and for
'Belshazzar,' which succeeded it. Neither of these, however, proved as
popular as the 'Fall of Jerusalem,' but the 'Martyr of Antioch'
contains that noble funeral ode beginning 'Brother, thou art gone
before us, and thy saintly soul is flown,' which is familiar to
numbers who are probably not aware of its authorship. It is worthy of
notice that as recently as 1880 Sir Arthur Sullivan set the 'Martyr of
Antioch' to music and brought it out at the Leeds Festival, where it
achieved an immediate and brilliant success, and was frequently
performed.[49] On the other hand, 'Samor' and 'Anne Boleyn' were
almost absolute failures, and, on the whole, the longer poems of
Milman have not retained their popularity, and probably now rarely
find a reader.

Those who turn to them will certainly be struck by the command of
language and metre they display. It was shown both in rhyme and in
blank verse. Many fine odes are scattered through them, and in the
octo-syllabic verse Milman always appears to us peculiarly happy. But
his poetry, like most of the poetry that was written under the Byronic
influence, was rather the poetry of rhetoric than of imagination, and
it wanted both the intensity and the concentration of the great
master. Stately, sonorous, fluent, unfailingly lucid, it was too
lengthy and too artificial, and Lockhart was not wholly wrong in
pronouncing that it showed 'fine talents, but no genius,' and in
urging that prose rather than poetry was the vehicle in which its
author was destined to succeed. In addition, however, to the funeral
ode to which we have referred, Milman has written many hymns, and some
of these are of singular beauty. They appeared originally in the
collection of that other great hymn-writer, Bishop Heber, who was one
of his dearest friends, and one of the men to whose memory he looked
back with the fondest affection. The Good Friday hymn, 'Bound upon th'
accursed tree,' the Palm Sunday hymn, 'Ride on, ride on in majesty,'
and perhaps still more that exquisitely pathetic hymn (so often
misprinted in modern hymn-books) beginning

When our heads are bowed with woe,
When our bitter tears o'erflow,

have long since taken their permanent place