be
proportioned to his proficiency in the pursuits which are fashionable
among his contemporaries; and that proficiency will in general be
proportioned to the vigor and activity of his mind. And it is well if,
after all his sacrifices and exertions, his works do not resemble a
lisping man or a modern ruin. We have seen in our own time great
talents, intense labor, and long meditation employed in this struggle
against the spirit of the age, and employed, we will not say absolutely
in vain, but with dubious success and feeble applause.

If these reasonings be just, no poet has ever triumphed over greater
difficulties than Milton. He received a learned education: he was a
profound and elegant classical scholar: he had studied all the mysteries
of rabbinical literature: he was intimately acquainted with every
language in modern Europe from which either pleasure or information was
then to be derived. He was perhaps the only poet of later times who has
been distinguished by the excellence of his Latin verse. The genius of
Petrarch was scarcely of the first order; and his poems in the ancient
language, though much praised by those who have never read them, are
wretched compositions. Cowley, with all his admirable wit and ingenuity,
had little imagination: nor, indeed, do we think his classical diction
comparable to that of Milton. The authority of Johnson is against us on
this point. But Johnson had studied the bad writers of the Middle Ages
till he had become utterly insensible to the Augustan elegance, and was
as ill-qualified to judge between two Latin styles as an habitual
drunkard to set up for a wine-taster.

Versification in a dead language is an exotic, a far-fetched, costly,
sickly imitation of that which elsewhere may be found in healthful and
spontaneous perfection. The soils on which this rarity flourishes are in
general as ill-suited to the production of vigorous native poetry as the
flower-pots of a hot-house to the growth of oaks. That the author of
the Paradise Lost should have written the epistle to Manso was truly
wonderful. Never before were such marked originality and such exquisite
mimicry found together. Indeed, in all the Latin poems of Milton the
artificial manner indispensable to such works is admirably preserved,
while, at the same time, his genius gives to them a peculiar charm, an
air of nobleness and freedom, which distinguishes them from all other
writings of the same class. They remind us of the