reason, be applied to the Old Testament, its writers being especially addicted to calling a spade a spade; and thereby many of its most telling rebukes of sin would be lost to us. We should then have an Abridgment of the Pentateuch for family reading; and the Proverbs of Solomon would dwindle down to half their present number.
I have thought it a fact not unworthy of note, and one suggesting strange and even mournful memories,that Milton's Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Poems appeared at about the same time. The height of purity and the abyss of obscenity honoured and disgraced the same age. Which of the two had the choice of the 'merry monarch' in whose reign they were published, it is not difficult to imagine. I should rate, however, both his merriment and his taste at very small value, and happily another prince, "Prince Posterity," has long since reversed his decision.
In turning, for a moment, from Rochester to Milton, we emerge from a pestilential atmosphere into purest air. Nothing base or dishonourable had a dwelling in that lofty mind:
—"low desires,
Low thoughts had there no place."
Macaulay, speaking of the profound immorality which distinguished the literature of the Restoration, mentions Waller, Cowley, and Butler as "exempt from the general contagion." "A mightier poet," he continues, "tried at once by pain, danger, poverty, obloquy and blindness, meditated, undisturbed by the obscene tumult which raged all around him, a song so sublime and so holy that it would not have misbecome the lips of those ethereal Virtues, whom he saw with that inner eye which no calamity could darken, flinging down on the jasper pavement their crowns of amaranth and gold."[1]
Of all the English poets, indeed, Milton was perhaps least affected by the influence of the school of Pantagruel. No trace of its operation is perceptible throughout his writings.
- ↑ History of England, Vol. i., (1848) pp. 398—9.
