nst him; but, having more patronage than ever minister had
before, he refused to answer the questions which (to repeat his own
expression) might incriminate him. And his refusal was given with a
smile of indifference, a consciousness of security. In those days, as
indeed in most others, the main use of power was promotion and
protection: and _honest man_ was never in any age among the titles of
nobility, and has always been the appellation used toward the feeble
and inferior by the prosperous. Nichols said on the present occasion,
'If this man is permitted to skulk away under such pretences, trial is
here a mockery.' Finding no support, he threw up his office as
Controller of the Navy, and never afterward entered the House of
Commons. Such a person, it appears to me, leads us aptly and
becomingly to that steadfast patriot on whose writings you promised me
your opinion; not incidentally, as before, but turning page after
page. It would ill beseem us to treat Milton with generalities.
Radishes and salt are the picnic quota of slim spruce reviewers: let
us hope to find somewhat more solid and of better taste. Desirous to
be a listener and a learner when you discourse on his poetry, I have
been more occupied of late in examining the prose.

_Southey._ Do you retain your high opinion of it?

_Landor._ Experience makes us more sensible of faults than of
beauties. Milton is more correct than Addison, but less correct than
Hooker, whom I wish he had been contented to receive as a model in
style, rather than authors who wrote in another and a poorer language;
such, I think, you are ready to acknowledge is the Latin.

_Southey._ This was always my opinion.

_Landor._ However, I do not complain that in oratory and history his
diction is sometimes poetical.

_Southey._ Little do I approve of it in prose on any subject.
Demosthenes and Aeschines, Lisias and Isaeus, and finally Cicero,
avoided it.

_Landor._ They did: but Chatham and Burke and Grattan did not; nor
indeed the graver and greater Pericles; of whom the most memorable
sentence on record is pure poetry. On the fall of the young Athenians
in the field of battle, he said, 'The year hath lost its spring.' But
how little are these men, even Pericles himself, if you compare them
as men of genius with Livy! In Livy, as in Milton, there are bursts of
passion which cannot by the nature of things be other than poetical,
nor (being so) come forth in other language. If Milton