Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Lectures on the British Poets, Vol. 2 of 2
Milton's. Was there ever any thing so delightful as the music of 'paradise Lost'? It is like that of a fine organ, has the fullest and the deepest tones of majesty, with all the softness and elegance of a Dorian ?ute, - variety with out end, and never equalled. Yet the doctor has little or nothing to say upon this cepious theme, but talks some thing about the unfitness of the English language for blank verse, and how apt it is, in the mouth of some readers, to degenerate into declamation. Oh, I could thrash his old jacket till I made his pension jingle in his pocket! To this playful vengeance of the gentle Cow per, let me add the belief that J ohnson's eulogy of the Paradise Lost bears the marks of having been extorted from him, chie?y, I presume, out of deference to Addi son's celebrated critical papers on that poem in The Spectator. He had no sympathy with the highest poetic genius that was contemporary with him. The fine powers of Gray, the elaborate finish of whose poetry, it might be thought, would have pleased him, were dis paraged in a style disreputable to a candid critic. The high, aspiring imagination of the unfortunate Collins won no better treatment; and this is lamentable to think of, when we remember how his tender nature suffered for the Want of sympathy, the fever of his visionary tremulous spirit turned in the anguish of disappointment to insanity, and his fitful career, closing in the succession of a moody melancholy, a few lucid intervals, and paroxysms of a maniac's violence, when his shrieks were heard in the most appalling manner echoing through the cloisters of Winchester Cathedral.
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