but speaking our language, and feeling an interest in our great men—a man could hardly believe at first how perplexed he would feel—how utterly at a loss for any adequate answer to this question, suddenly proposed "Who and what was Milton?" That is to say, what is the place which he fills in his own vernacular literature? what station does he hold in universal literature?
We, if abruptly called upon in that summary fashion to convey a commensurate idea of Milton, one which might at once correspond to his pretensions, and yet he readily intelligible to the savage, should answer perhaps thus:—Milton is not an author amongst authors, not a poet amongst poets, but a power amongst powers; and the Paradise Lost is not a book amongst books, not a poem among poems, but a central force amongst forces. Let us explain. There is this great distinction amongst books: some, though possibly the best in their class, are still no more than books—not indispensable, not incapable of supplementary representation by other books. If they had never been—if their place had continued for ages unfilled—not the less, upon a sufficient excitement arising, there would always have been found the ability, either directly to fill up the vacancy, or at least to meet the same passion virtually, though by a work differing in form. Thus, supposing Butler to have died in youth, and the Hudibras to have been intercepted by his premature death, still the ludicrous aspects of the Parliamentary war, and its fighting saints, were too striking to have perished. If not in a narrative form, the case would have come forward in the drama. Puritanical sanctity, in collision with the ordinary interests of life, and with its militant propensities, offered too striking a field for the Satiric Muse, in any case, to have passed in total neglect. The impulse was too strong for repression—it was a volcanic agency, that, by some opening or other, must have worked a way for itself to the upper air. Yet Butler was a most original poet, and a creator within his own province. But, like many another original mind, there is little doubt that he quelled and repressed, by his own excellence, other minds of the same cast. Mere despair of excelling him, so far as not, after all, to seem imitators, drove back others who would have pressed into that arena, if not already brilliantly filled. Butler failing, there would have been another Butler, either in the same or in some analogous form.
But, with regard to Milton and the Miltonic power, the case is far otherwise. If the man had failed, the power would have failed. In that mode of power which he wielded, the function was exhausted in the man—species was identified with the individual—the poetry was incarnated in the poet.
Let it be remembered, that, of all powers which act upon man through his intellectual nature, the very rarest is that which we moderns call the Sublime. The Grecians had apparently no word for it, unless it were that which they meant by το ογκωδες: for ὑψος was a comprehensive expression for all qualities which gave a character of grace or animation to the composition, such even as were philosophically opposed to the sublime. In the Roman poetry, and especially in Lucan, at times also Juvenal, there is an exhibition of a moral sublime, perfectly distinct from any thing known to the Greek poetry. The delineations of republican grandeur, as expressing itself through the principal leaders in the Roman camps, or the trampling under foot of ordinary superstitions, as given in the reasons assigned to Labienus for passing the oracle of the Lybian Jupiter unconsulted, are in a style to which there is nothing corresponding in the whole Grecian literature, nor would they have been comprehensible to an Athenian. The famous line—"Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quocunque moveris," and the brief review of such questions as might be worthy of an oracular god, with the summary declaration, that every one of those points we know already by the light of nature, and could not know them better though Jupiter Ammon himself were to impress them on our attention—
"Scimus, et hæc nobis non altius inseret Ammon:"
all this is truly Roman in its sublimity; and so exclusively Roman, that there, and not in poets like the Augustan, expressly modelling their poems on Grecian types, ought the Roman mind to be studied.
On the other hand, for that species of the sublime which does not rest
