sea, and we may observe that the allusion to her name (already made in flavam comam), is still kept up.-fidem, sc. mutatam. It applies to the sea, as well as to the lady; for fides is the ground of trust, reliance, confidence. Virgil uses infidum marmor, Geor. i. 254, and fides pelagi, Æn. iii. 69, of the sea; compare Æn. v. 849; and Isocrates has, in prose, rv åñiσtíav toû ñoλéμov, Archid. § 21. -nigris, as opposed to the aurea of v. 9.-æquora, i. q. æquor, the surface of the sea, i. e. her countenance.-fruitur. This verb may be used of the sea, as well as of porticoes, Ep. i. 1, 71.—aurea. This may allude to the colour of her hair, as well as to the serenity of her countenance, and the blandness of her manners. Propertius has (iv. 7, 85) aurea Cynthia, and Tibullus (i. 6, 58) auream anum. As applied to the sea, it may denote its splendour in the rays of the sun. Aureus is used of sol, luna, and æther, denoting brightness.-vacuam, sc. a ventis, v. 7, of the sea; irarum, the tempest of the mind, of Pyrrha, the tristes Amaryllidos iras of Virgil, that is, bursts of temper.-amabilem (épareɩóv). In iii. 13, 10, he has frigus amabile, and Virgil (Geor. iv. 478) has palus inamabilis. Why not then mare amabile? In prose, Cicero has (ad Fam. xvi. 18) Tusculanum erit amabilius. The French use their aimable in a similar manner, as aimable grotte, and we ourselves say, a lovely landscape, bay, sheet of water, etc.—Sperat, expects to be.-fallacis, i. e. that may deceive, go contrary to his expectations; the uncertainty of her temper.-intentata, untried, not embarked on: comp. Virg. Buc. iv. 32; with respect to her, having had no experience of her changeful mood.-nites. As to the applicability of this to the calm surface of the sea in the solar beams, there can be no dispute. It also expresses the serenity of her countenance, and the lustre of her hair and eyes. If the Æsopic fable of the Shepherd and the Sea be as old as the times of Horace, I should suspect him to have had it in his mind. At all events he may have thought of these verses of Lucretius (v. 1002): Nec poterat quemquam placidi pellacia ponti The remainder is easy. Horace says, that he himself had embarked on this apparently calm and tranquil sea, and that such a tempest had arisen, that he had hardly made his escape from the waves in which he was overwhelmed.* * In another of Horace's Odes (ii. 17), the critics seem to have missed Y .1 SAMSON AGONISTES. Though this was, in all likelihood, the last composed of all Milton's poems, we place our notice of it here, as, on account of its being of so different a nature from the heroic poems, and so totally unconnected with them, it would have been incongruous to have treated of them together. Samson Agonistes was first published in 1671, along with Paradise Regained; which last poem, as we have seen, was finished in 1666. As it is probable that the mind of Milton could not remain in a state of inaction, we may suppose that it reverted to his former idea of composing dramas in the Greek manner, on sacred subjects; and that of Samson, though not included in the list which he had drawn up, may, from the resemblance of the fortunes of that hero to his own, have led to his giving it the preference to any of the fine subjects contained in that list, formed ere the clouds of misfortune had descended on his head. Would that he had devoted to them the time and labour wasted on now-neglected controversies! Samson was a hero raised up by Heaven to be a chief instrument in freeing his country from the yoke of the idolatrous Philistines; in his simplicity he united himself in marriage with a daughter of that race, and the consequence was his blindness, his captivity, and his living to find all his work undone, and Israel, from its own want of virtue and energy, still in bondage. Milton viewed himself also as raised up by Heaven to vindicate the the exact sense. Indeed one might almost fancy they took columen for columna. The figure is that Mæcenas and Horace formed an edifice, of which the former was the roof, without which the latter was of little worth. cause of religious, civil, and domestic liberty, against tyranny and superstition. In this cause he had long laboured with energy and with success, and in it he had lost his sight; he had lived to find all his work undone, civil and religious despotism once more triumphant, and the nation crouching beneath them, and himself in a state of what might be viewed as bondage, as he could not openly give utterance to his sentiments and feelings. He too had married unadvisedly one of the opposite party, and the ill-assorted union had embittered his life. In the character of Samson therefore he could give vent to his own feelings, and covertly reproach the people for their want of true virtue and energy; the dramatic form also enabled him to deplore the fate of the heroes of the Commonwealth. But the Grecian drama also offered him parallels in the noble-minded Prometheus, the victim of despotism, from his fruitless attempts to serve mankind, and in the unhappy Edipus, whom Fate had sunk in blindness and in misery. We may observe how he follows the course of these dramas. Thus, in that of Æschylus, Prometheus, when left to himself, soliloquizes on his unhappy condition; the Chorus then comes in, and joins him. Oceanus next appears, to advise and offer his aid for his liberation; when he is gone, Io arrives, and her narrative ensues; and then Hermes comes, sent by the despot who had caused him to be chained on the rock, requiring obedience from him, and meets with a resolute refusal. In Milton's drama Samson is led in, and is then left by himself, to soliloquize on his woes; a Chorus comes to console him; his father Manoah next arrives, and after some time departs, to try to effect his liberation; his wife, Dalila, and the giant Harapha then appear in succession; the first to excuse her treachery, the latter to insult him. They are succeeded by the herald sent by the Philistine lords, requiring him to come and make them sport, and who departs on having received a decided refusal. Here the parallelism with the Prometheus ceases; in what follows we may discern an agreement with the Edipus at Colonos. Edipus departs at a divine summons; and Theseus, who had been present at it, relates the catastrophe. In like manner Samson, feeling internally a divine summons, departs, and one who had witnessed his end appears, and narrates it. The visit of Polyneices to his blind father is a parallel to that of Dalila to her husband, whose misery she had caused. The opening lines of the Samson also have a resemblance to those of the dipus. We have always regarded this as a noble poem, the swan-song of a mighty genius. In the eye of criticism, free from pedantry, its defects must, we should think, be hardly appreciable. Throughout it has the force and dignity of Eschylus, and at times it exhibits the majesty and sweetness of Sophocles. Had Milton flourished in ancient Attica, he had surely ranked with these mighty poets, milder and sweeter than the former, grander and more elevated than the latter. Yet Johnson says, after some pedantic criticism about the want of a Middle founded on the Aristotelian rules, "this is the tragedy which ignorance has admired and bigotry applauded!" As to the Middle, it certainly has it fully as much as the Prometheus, and as several others of the dramas of Greece; and, in fact, the criticism amounts to this, that Milton should not have chosen that subject, for no human genius could have made more of it than he has done. As Milton adhered closely to the ancient models in this piece, the versification is of course of a subdued character, and devoid of the brilliant poetry of the Paradise Lost. But it is correct and chaste, dignified and solemn. The characters are well sustained,—that of the hero in particular; the occasional employment of familiar language, which offended Johnson, is common to him with the Grecian dramatists. The lyric portion, which is monostrophic, instead of being in strophe, antistrophe, and epode, and which only rimes capriciously, has given most offence to critics. Johnson, as might be expected, says that it is "often so harsh and dissonant as scarce to preserve, whether the lines end with or without rimes, any appearance of metrical regularity." Cumberland says, that "in some places it is no measure at all, or such at least as the ear will not patiently endure, nor which any recitation can make harmonious ;" and Hallam, that the metre itself "is infelicitous, the lines being frequently of a number of syllables not recognized in the usage of English poetry, and destitute of rhythmical measure, falls into prose." Others have expressed themselves in a similar manner. Now here are three critics, none perhaps remarkable for a poetic ear, accusing a poet, who had an ear for music and for verse of the utmost delicacy, of writing under the name of lyric poetry lines utterly devoid of melody. Surely then the suspicion must arise that this is but a part of the character of the ordinary English mind, which does not, for example, receive the same enjoyment from the high Italian schools of painting, as from the tamer and more familiar schools of Flanders and Holland. The presumption must be that the fault is in the reader, not in the poet. For our own part we freely own, that we are so convinced that a poet of Milton's |