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I do acknowledge and confess That I this honour, I this pomp have brought To Dagon, and advanced his praises high Among the heathen round; to God have brought Dishonour, obloquy, and oped the mouths Of idolists and atheists; have brought scandal To Israel, diffidence of God, and doubt In feeble hearts, propense enough before To waver, to fall off, and join with idols; Which is my chief affliction, shame, and sorrow, The anguish of my soul, that suffers not My eye to harbour sleep, or thoughts to rest.
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This extolled and magnified nation, regardless both of honour won, or deliverances vouchsafed, to fall back, or rather to creep back, so poorly as it seems the multitude would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of kingship! To be ourselves the slanderers of our own just and religious deeds! To verify all the bitter predictions of our triumphing enemies, who will now think they wisely discerned and justly censured us and all our actions as rash, rebellious, hypocritical, and impious! These things, which Milton refused to contemplate as possible when he wrote his
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Ready Way to establish a Free Commonwealth, had actually come to pass. The English nation is to him the enslaved and erring Samson--a Samson, however, yet to burst his bonds, and bring down ruin upon Philistia.
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Samson Agonistes is thus a prophetic drama, the English counterpart of the world-drama of
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Prometheus Bound.
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--a suggestive picture. What thoughts must have been travelling through his mind, undisturbed by external things! How many of the passers knew that they flitted past the greatest glory of the age of Newton, Locke, and Wren? For one who would reverence the author of
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Paradise Lost, there were probably twenty who would have been ready with a curse for the apologist of the killing of the King. In-doors he was seen by Dr. Wright, in Richardson's time an aged clergyman in Dorsetshire, who found him up one pair of stairs, in a room hung with rusty green
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Gout was the enemy of Milton's latter days; we have seen that he had begun to suffer from it before he wrote
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Samson Agonistes. Without it, he said, he could find blindness tolerable. Yet even in the fit he would be cheerful, and would sing. It is grievous to write that, about 1670, the departure of his daughters promoted the comfort of his household. They were sent out to learn embroidery as a means of future support--a proper step in itself, and one which would appear to have entailed considerable expense upon Milton. But they might perfectly well have remained inmates of the family, and the inference is that domestic discord had at length grown unbearable to all. Friends, or at least visitors, were, on the other hand, more numerous than of late years. The most interesting were the
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Earl of Anglesey, who must have
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very much if, as Phillips reports, he often came all the way to Bunhill Fields to enjoy it; and Dryden, whose generous admiration does not seem to have been affected by Milton's over-hasty sentence upon him as
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One of Dryden's visits is famous in literary history, when he came with the modest request that Milton would let him turn his epic into an opera.
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Aye, responded Milton, equal to the occasion,
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--to tag being to put a shining metal point--compared in Milton's fancy to a rhyme--at the end of a lace or cord. Dryden took him at his word, and in due time
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Paradise Lost had become an opera under the title of
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The State of Innocence and Fall of Man, which may also be interpreted as referring to the condition of the poem before Dryden laid hands upon it and afterwards. It is a puzzling performance altogether; one sees not any more than Sir Walter Scott could see how a drama requiring paradisiacal costume could have been acted even in the age of Nell Gwyn; and yet it is even more unlikely that Dryden should have written a play not intended for the stage. The same contradiction prevails in the piece itself; it would not be unfair to call it the most absurd burlesque ever written without burlesque intention; and yet it displays such intellectual resources, such vigour, bustle, adroitness, and bright impudence, that admiration almost counterweighs derision. Dryden could not have made such an exhibition of Milton and himself twenty years afterwards, when he said that, much as he had always admired Milton, he felt that he had not admired him half enough. The reverence which he felt even in 1674 for
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contrasts finely with the ordinary Restoration estimate of Milton conveyed in the complimentary verses by Lee, prefixed to
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The State of Innocence
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To the dead bard your fame a little owes, For Milton did the wealthy mine disclose, And rudely cast what you could well dispose. He roughly drew, on an old-fashioned ground, A chaos, for no perfect world was found, Till through the heap your mighty genius shined; He was the golden ore, which you refined.
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Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio; or The Method of Ramus, 1672. The first is insignificant; and the second even Professor Masson pronounces,
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Both apparently belong to his school-keeping days: the little tract,
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Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration,