All blots of error bleached in Heaven's sight;

All life's perplexing colours lost in light.

I have indulged very freely in quotation, but I must find room for the following noble lines which conclude the sixth part:

Lean nearer to the Heart that beats through night;

Its curtain of the dark your veil of light.

Peace Halcyon-like to founded faith is given,
And it can float on a reflected Heaven
Surely as Knowledge that doth rest at last
Isled on its "Atom " in the unfathomed vast
Life-Ocean, heaving through the infinite,
From out whose dark the shows of being flit,
In flashes of the climbing waves' white crest;
Some few a moment luminous o'er the rest!

I have already said that I shall not presume to attempt any estimate of Mr. Massey's relative position among the poets of the Victorian era; if he has no pretension to rank among its classics, in the house of song there are many mansions. My purpose will have been fulfilled if I recall to a generation which, judging from popular anthologies and current literary memoirs, appears to have forgotten them, poems full of interest and full of charm.

MILTONIC MYTHS AND THEIR

AUTHORS

I

HE posthumous fortunes of Milton form a curious chapter in literary history. First, prophecy was busy with his name, and prophecy, delivering itself in the person of a contemporary critic, one William Winstanley, thus pronounced: "John Milton was one whose natural parts might deservedly give him a place amongst the principal of our English poets, having written two Heroic Poems and a Tragedy, namely, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain'd, and Samson Agonistes. But his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a Snuffe, and his memory will always stink." For this verdict political prejudice was no doubt mainly responsible. But in 1750 Dr. Johnson was induced to write a preface and a postscript to a volume, the effect of which, had it attained legitimately the end at which it aimed, would have been, if not exactly the fulfilment, something not very far from the fulfilment of Winstanley's strange prophecy. In or about 1747 a Scotchman named Lauder, irritated at the failure of an attempt to introduce an edition of Arthur Johnston's Latin version of the Psalms into schools, in consequence of a contemptuous comparison instituted originally Lives of the Most Famous English Poets, p. 195.

1

by Pope between Johnston and Milton, determined, if possible, to blast Milton's fame.' This he sought to effect by accusing and convicting him of wholesale plagiarism. The fellow was a scholar, and in the course of his reading had explored the writings of the Scotch, Dutch, and English Latin poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of whom were very little known in England even to the learned. As much of this poetry was on sacred subjects, and had, like Paradise Lost, drawn largely on the Old Testament and on theological common

In a remarkable letter which appears to have escaped the notice of the historians of this affair, written to Dr. Birch, preserved among Birch's papers in the British Museum, and printed in Anecdotes of Eminent Persons, vol. i, pp. 122-128, Lauder attributes his infamous conduct to another motive: "You," he writes to Birch, were the innocent cause of my offence, more than any man alive. I mean your Appendix to Milton's Life, where you relate an unparalleled scene of villainy as acted by Milton against King Charles I, who, in order to blast the reputation of that prince, the undoubted author of Eikon Basilike, stole a prayer out of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia and obliged the printer of the King's book, under severe penalties and threatnings, to subjoin it to his Majesty's performance, and then made a hideous outcry against his own action, merely to create a jealousy, as was observed just now, that if his Majesty was not the author of the prayers in that Treatise he was far less the author of the Treatise itself, which thing is believed by thousands to this day: Now, if that action when committed by Milton is without malignity why should it be deemed so criminal in me.... If this be the case, as you very well know it is, do you think I deserved so much to be reproached as I have been for acting by Milton as he acted by the King?" For this abominable charge there was, needless to say, no evidence whatever, as Birch himself admits when he relates the scandal. See Birch, Milton, vol. i, Introduction, p. xxxiii.

places, both in relation to incident as well as to doctrine and sentiment, there were necessarily many analogies and parallels to be found in it to Milton's epic. These Lauder industriously collected, and they were pointed out in a series of papers communicated to the Gentleman's Magazine between 1747 and 1749. The papers naturally attracted attention, and in 1750 they were collected, with considerable additions, and published in a volume, dedicated to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, entitled An Essay on Milton's Use and Imitation of the Moderns in his Paradise Lost.

The papers in the Gentleman's Magazine had disturbed and surprised Milton's many admirers, but the discoveries there made were nothing to what this volume revealed. In a few weeks the essay was the talk of every one to whom the name and fame of Milton were known, and the sensation made by it was extraordinary, as well it might have been. For it was here demonstrated that a poem which was the glory and pride of our literature, and had given an Englishman a place beside Homer and Virgil, was nothing but a compilation, an ingenious cento of fragments selected and dovetailed out of the writings of poets known only to the curious. The scheme and architecture of the poem, as well as the machinery and details of the first two books, including the debate in Pandemonium, had been stolen from the Sarcotis, an epic poem in five books, written about 1650 by Jacobus Masenius, a Jesuit professor in the college at Cologne. With wholesale plunderings from Masenius had been blended plunderings on a similar scale from the Adamus

Exsul of Grotius and from the Locustae of Phineas Fletcher. The description of the creation of the world, the scenes in Eden, and the account of the Fall had been concocted out of the Creationis Rerum Poetica Descriptio of Andrew Ramsay, the Virgilius Evangelizans of Alexander Ross, and Silvester's English translation of Du Bartas. The dialogue at the end of the fourth book between Gabriel and Satan had been translated from one of the tragedies of Johannes Franciscus Quintianus. The Bellum Angelicum of Frederic Taubmann, a professor in the University of Wittemburg, had supplied the shameless plagiarist with a great part of the sixth book; while the famous panegyric on marriage had been filched from the Triumphus Pacis of Caspar Staphorstius. Many other illustrations are given of these appropriations, and their supposed plumes are restored to a numerous rabble of obscure Latin versifiers. "And now," says Lauder in summary, "Milton is reduced to his true standard, appears mortal and uninspired, and in ability little superior to the poets above mentioned; but in honest and open dealing, the best quality of the human mind, not inferior, perhaps, to the most unlicensed plagiary that ever wrote."

With an alacrity which did him little credit, Dr. Johnson, whose prejudice against Milton is well known, heartily supported Lauder in his "discoveries," having indeed furnished him with a preface and postscript to his work. But the triumph of this infamous impostor was short-lived. In less than a year after the appearance of his work the Rev. John Douglas, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, followed with a pamphlet, Milton vindicated from the