be laughed into contempt: by no means—it was deemed of such consequence by the theological faculty of Paris, that it was thought necessary to censure it. One of the propositions, which had neither offended the Spanish divines or the Holy Inquisition, was-that God gave to the Holy Virgin all that he would, and would give her all that he could, and could give her all that was not of the essence of God." A violent opposition was made to the censure of so much delectable inspiration, by some of the doctors of the Sorbonne, who divided on this important occasion into irreconcileable parties, and when the affair was decided, two of them formally protested. A revision was in consequence held necessary; and, to appease the devotees who thought the lawful wor→ ship paid to the Holy Virgin in danger, it was declared that such was not the case. In Spain the whole was taken for granted, and his present Majesty's embroidery of petticoats is probably one of the precious results. STANZAS TO A LADY. Sweet friend, indeed thy thoughts are too severe ; I have endured, and shall subdue my lot; So had I borne from any but from thee. There comes an hour that changeth all things dear, I know not to what land, but I depart, I have not been so callous not to weep We stand asunder, and I hold no claim, Oh! give me back the scenes of early days, LONDON :-Published by HENRY L. HUNT, 38, Tavistock-street, Covent-garden, and 22, Old Bond-street. Price Fourpence; or, if stamped for country circulation free of postage, Sevenpence. Sold by all Booksellers and Newsvenders in town; and by the following Agents in the country: Edinburgh, Messrs. Bell and Bradfute. Glasgow, W. R. Macphun. Liverpool, T. Smith. Bath, at the London Newspaper Office. Sunderland, W. Chalk, High-street. Birmingham, J. Drake. Printed by C. W. REYNELL, Broad-street, Golden-square. THE LITERARY EXAMINER. No. X.-SATURDAY, SEPT. 6, 1823. THE INDICATOR. No. LXXXIII. There he arriving, round about doth fly, And takes survey with busie, curious eye, Now this, now that, he tasteth tenderly.-SPENSER. ON THE LATIN POEMS OF MILTON.. [Continued.] 2 THE book of Elegies is followed by a book of Epigrams; by which the English reader is to understand, not merely pieces of pleasantry in the modern sense of Epigrams, but any brief and terse set of lines of the nature or length of an inscription; for such is the ancient meaning of the word. Milton's are, for the most part, poor enough; particularly the pleasant ones. He could not descend from the gravity of his genius with impunity. He could "do little things with grace", whatever Dr. Johnson has said to the contrary: but still they must be serious things, -courtesies and condescensions. His laugh is Sardonic. His assumption of animal spirits reminds one of his own description of amateur actors in colleges," writhing and un-boning their clergy limbs." The first four Epigrams are upon Guy Faux, and all turn upon the same conceit. Faux, blowing up the King and Parliament, is to send them unwittingly to heaven. Milton's anti-papal fierceness had already begun, though not his anti-monarchical. In the second epigram, the Pope is saluted with his old title from the Revelations, of the Beast with Seven Heads: Quæ septemgemino, Bellua, monte lates: Thou Beast, whose lair is on the sevenfold hill. In the third is an image in the true Miltonian style of grandeur, though not very fit for its situation. As a portrait of James the First, it becomes ludicrous. The poet says, that the King" sublimely rapt up to heaven in this Tartarean fire, would have entered the ethereal regions, a burnt shade." Ibat ad æthereas, umbra perusta, plagas. The new Elijah ought to have been superior to this "mortal consequence." The poor fumbling and tumbling old James, rolling up to heaven in a mystification of smoke, and issuing forth of a burnt colour, makes one's imagination uncharitable. Had Buchanan been alive, he would have translated perusta,-warm from a whipping; VOL I. Ibericis peruste, funibus latus. 10 Epigram the fifth is a common-place on the invention of cannon. Jove's thunderbolts have been taken from him. The sixth, seventh, and eighth Epigrams are compliments to Leonora Baroni, a famous singer, whom Milton heard in Italy. The first is very elegant. The poet, speaking of the guardian angel which is appointed to every body, says that Leonora's voice announces the very presence of the deity; or if not so, that the intelligence of the third heaven (the heaven of love) has left his sphere, and comes stealing in secret through her bosom. But I must endeavour to translate it. AD LEONORAM ROME CANENTEM. Angelus unicuique suus, sic credite gentes, 1 Quòd si cuncta quidem Deus est, per cunctaque fusus, TO LEONORA SINGING AT ROME. To every one (so have ye faith) is given A winged guardian from the ranks of heaven.g Thy voice proclaims the present deity. Either the present deity we hear, Or he of the third heaven hath left his sphere, And through the bosom's pure and warbling wells, Breathes tenderly his smoothed oracles; Breathes tenderly, and so with easy rounds Teaches our mortal hearts to bear immortal sounds. If god is all, and in all nature dwells, In thee alone he speaks, mute ruler in all else. The second of these Epigrams is worthy of the first. He alludes to the story of Tasso's love for the Princess of Este; and says, that had that other Leonora possessed the powers of this, the poet's frenzy would have been turned into a celestial composure. The third, though inferior, is not destitute of beauty. The famous Siren, says the poet(Parthenope)-whose tomb the people of Naples boast of having among them, is not dead. She has only exchanged the hoarse murmurs of Pausilippo for the gentle waters of the Tiber, and delights men and gods at Rome with her singing. Of the Leonora Baroni here praised, and her mother Adriana the Fair, another singer as famous, the reader will find some interesting accounts in Warton. One part of a passage which he quotes from a French writer, I must be indulged in extracting. It presents a family picture quite Italian. The writer ist M. Maugars, Prior of St. Peter de Mac at Paris, an excellent performer on the viol, who wrote a life of Malherbe, and a Discours sur la Musique d'Italie. After giving a high account of Leonora's manner and science, as well as voice, he says, "But I must not forget, that one day she did me the particular favour to sing with her mother and sister. Her mother played upon the lute, her sister upon the harp, and › herself upon the theorbo. This concert, composed of three fine voices, and of three different instruments, so powerfully captivated my senses, and threw me into such raptures, that I forgot my mortality, and thought myself among the angels, enjoying the content of the blessed.” The three next Epigrams arose out of the controversy with poor Salmasius. They are as bad as the rest of the pleasantries, with which Milton condescended to sprinkle his triumph. In the first, Salmasius is ridiculed for translating the English county phrase Hundred into Hundreda, and for having had a hundred Jacobuses given him to write his book by the young King of England then in exile.. The Jacobuses are called “exulantis viscera marsupii regis,”—the bowels of a royal exile's purse. Dr. Johnson is very angry with this attack on the king's hungry exchequer, but says it might have been "expected from the savageness of Milton." But observe here the justice of the arbitrary and their abettors. The royal and the great may plunder and laugh at poverty to all eternity; but if they are ever caught at a disadvantage, and the people return them one of their jokes, then it is, "Oh the savageness!" Johnson adds, by way of a show of impartiality, that "Oldmixon had meanness enough to delight in bilking an alderman of London, who had more money than the Pretender." But what sort of a set-off to Milton is Oldmixon? Why did he not tell us some mean stories, easy enough to be found, of the members of the Stuart family, the Pretender himself included. It was not unnatural in Milton to triumph over the long insolence of kings, now brought to this pass in the person of Charles II.; yet the instance after all was unfortunately chosen. It was an act of real liberality in Charles, at that time beset with pecuniary difficulties, to give a man a hundred golden pieces of money for writing against his father's enemies. So blind however is: servility, or so false is the story itself, that Wood angrily denies it; and affirms that Salmasius had nothing. He says, the King sent him his thanks, “but not with a purse of gold, as John Milton, the impudent lyar, reported." See Warton, as above referred to. The amount of the second of these Epigrams against Salmasius is, that his writings are a good thing for the fish brought to market, for they are to be wrapped up in the great scholar's sheets. The third is a couplet against Salmasius's friend and assistant More, a Scotchman. More, it seems, was a church and state man of the true order, equally fond of kings and maid-servants. The allusion of the Epigram is to a child he had by the femme de chambre of Salmasius's wife. "Perhaps," says our own scholar and loyalist Warton, " Morus was too inattentive to the mistress." Warton informs us that Madame de Saumaise was a scold, and called Juno by her husband's brother critics; which did not however hinder her from giving some strange symptoms of a taste not altogether conjugal, which he proceeds to repeat. I leave them where I find them, not having yet arrived at the full taste of scholastic annotation. Love and imagination may go their loving lengths; but love in the shape of hate and a female pedagogue is too much. Of the distich upon More, which is an idle play upon the words "well-mannered" and "well-manned," (Mores signifying manners) Warton justly observes, that it is inconsitent with our author's usual delicacy. "But revenge," he adds, " too naturally seeks gratification at the expense of propriety, and the same apology must be made for a few other obscene ambiguities on the name of More in the prose part of our author's two replies to More." This is true; but it may be remarked, that scholars: in the learned languages have always taken a strange licence in this matter. They seem to think, that the moment they turn the dark lantern of their Greek or Latin to the side of the uninitiated, they need not keep any ceremony with those who are in the secret. Their occasional exclamations of modesty and horror only make the matter worse, especially when followed up with long explanations of the nefariousness in question, and the "amorous delay" of versions and parallel passages. The sight of one of these brutish old scholars playing the Abelard and Eloisa with a text, and at the same time pretending not, is monstrous and nauseous; but they go where the most luxuriant of lovers would never have thought of following them. "The same is not the same." The license of a loving imagination becomes a horror in that of filthiness and hypocrisy; nor can a true lover of Love bear to see even the commonest ideas of the natural kindness of its intercourse perverted and degraded to the purposes of satire. However, let not Milton himself be thought to have gone farther than he did. He was tempted into a bad joke or two by an ostentation of scholarship; but his poetry was always at hand to save him; and "Mr. Milton's amatory notions" are still worthy of Paradise.. Epigram 12th is the fable of the rich man who transplanted a fertile apple-tree belonging to a peasant into his own ground; where instead of the presents of fine fruit that had tempted him, the tree yielded nothing. This Naboth-vineyard Apologue was, perhaps, written with a political intention. It is of no value in itself. Epigram the 13th and last is very noble. It is addressed, in the name of Cromwell, to Christina, Queen of Sweden; and accompanied a present which he made her of his portrait. A doubt has been raised whether it was written by Milton or Andrew Marvell, a man quite capable of the performance; but as Marvell was not then associated with Milton in the office of secretary, the chance appears in favour of the latter. However, the verses were published in the posthumous collection of Marvell's poems, which were printed," says his nominal wife Mary (who appears to have been married to him after some fashion of his own)" according to the exact copies of my late dear husband, under his own hand-writing." Marvell, besides being the inventor of our modern prose style in wit, and an inflexible patriot, had a strong and grave talent for poetry, as the reader may see (and ought to see) in his song about the Bermudas boat, his lines on a Wounded Fawn, the verses in which he mentions "Fairfax and the starry Vere," and those others where he speaks of Tearing our pleasures with rough strife His satire is sometimes coarse, and must be excused by the age he lived in; but it was witty and formidable. His spirit, at once light and powerful, hung admirably between the two parties of Dissenters. and Cavaliers; was the startling shield of the one, and a sword still more perplexing to the other for it could dip and fashion its sturdy metal in the levity of their own fires. His talent at exaggeration, at running a joke down, is exquisite. He was Milton's adiniring and inflexible friend. But I forget the verses before us, |