who, at the same time, has done so much to bring forward the writings of others to bring out the hidden-to revive the forgotten-and to honor the neglected but true genius. We are most deeply indebted to him, too, for his labors of love upon our great Epic; for no critic, not excepting Addison himself, has had a more just appreciation of the genius of Milton, or has criticised him with truer taste or sounder judgment. SIR WALTER RALEIGH. It was now resolved that Sir Walter should be brought to the bar of the King's Bench by habeas corpus, and execution awarded upon his former sentence. He was accordingly brought up, on October 28, 1618, though taken from his bed under the affliction of an ague fit. Execution was accordingly granted; and he was delivered to the Sheriffs of Middlesex, and conveyed to the Gate House, near the Palace-yard. His heroism did not forsake him. To some, who deplored his misfortunes, he observed, with calmness, that "the world itself is but a larger prison, out of which some are daily selected for execution." On Thursday, October 29th, he was conducted to the scaffold, in Old Palace-yard. His countenance was cheerful; and he said, "I desire to be borne withal, for this is the third day of my fever; and if I shall show any weakness, I beseech you to attribute it to my malady, for this is the hour in which it was wont to come." He then addressed the spectators in a long speech, which ended thus: "And now I intreat you to join with me in prayer to the great God of Heaven, whom I have grievously offended, being a man full of all vanity, and have lived a sinful life, in all sinful callingsfor I have been a soldier, a captain, a sea captain, and a courtier, which are courses of wickedness and vice-that God would forgive me, and cast away my sins from me, and that he would receive me into everlasting life. So I take my leave of you all, making my peace with God." When he bade farewell to his friends, he said, "I have a long journey to go, and therefore I will take my leave." Having asked the executioner to show him the axe, which the executioner hesitated to do, he said, "I prithee let me see it! Dost thou think I am afraid of it?" He then took hold of it, felt the edge, and, smiling, said to the sheriff, "This is a sharp medicine; but it is a physician for all evils." He forgave the executioner, and being asked which way he would lay himself on the block, he answered, "So the heart be right, it is no matter which way the head lies." At two strokes his head was taken off, without the least shrink or motion of his body. * * * If there were no other blots in King James's reign, Raleigh's death alone would render it intolerable to every generous and reflecting mind. When I consider what sort of talents and conduct covered Cecil's grave with wealth and honors, while those of Raleigh led him to the scaffold, and his posterity to extinction in poverty and ruin, my heart bursts with indignation and horror! Raleigh's mind appears to have been characterized by boldness, and freedom from nice scruples, either in thought or action. He possessed all the various faculties of the mind in such ample degrees that, to whichever of them he had given exclusive or unproportionate cultivation, in that he must have highly excelled. There are so many beautiful lines in the poem prefixed to Spenser's "Fairy Queen," beginning "Methought I saw," &c., that it is clear he was capable of attaining a high place among poetical writers. Do I pronounce Raleigh a poet? Not, perhaps, in the judgment of a severe criticism. Raleigh, in his better days, was too much occupied in action to have cultivated all the powers of a poet; which require solitude and perpetual meditation, and a refinement of sensibility, such as intercourse with business and the world deadens. But, perhaps, it will be pleaded, that his long years of imprisonment gave him leisure for meditation more than enough. It has been beautifully said by Lovelace that "Stone walls do not a prison make, so long as the mind is free. But broken spirits, and indescribable injuries and misfortunes, do not agree with the fervor required by the muse. Hope, that "sings of promised pleasure," could never visit him in his dreary bondage; and ambition, whose lights had hitherto led him through difficulties and dangers and sufferings, must now have kept entirely aloof from one whose fetters disabled him to follow as a votary in her train. Images of rural beauty, quiet and freedom, might, perhaps, have added, by the contrast, to the poignancy of his present painful situation; and he might rather prefer the severity of mental labor in unravelling the dreary and comfortless records of perplexing history in remote ages of war and bloodshed. We have no proof that Raleigh possessed the copious, vivid, and creative powers of Spenser; nor is it probable that any culti * See this poem in "Compendium of English Literature." vation would have brought forth from him fruit equally rich. But in his poetry, I think we can perceive some traits of attraction and excellence which perhaps even Spenser wanted. If less diversified than that gifted bard, he would, I think, have sometimes been more forcible and sublime. His images would have been more gigantic, and his reflections more daring. With all his mental attention keenly bent on the busy state of existing things in political society, the range of his thought had been lowered down to practical wisdom: but other habits of intellectual exercise, excursions into the ethereal fields of fiction, and converse with the spirits which inhabit those upper regions, would have given a grasp and a color to his conceptions as magnificent as the fortitude of his soul. His "History of the World" proves the extent of his knowledge and learning, and the profundity of his opinions: and this written with a broken spirit, in prison, and under the pining health produced by close air, and want of exercise and every cheering comfort. How grand must have been his fiery feelings in the high hope of enterprise, bounding over the ocean, and with new worlds opening before him! Well might Spenser call him "The Shepherd of the Ocean." Raleigh was, above other men, one who had a head to design, a heart to resolve, and a hand to execute. He lived in an age of great men in every department; but, taking a union of splendid qualities, he was the first of that most brilliant and heroic epoch. He was not a poet of the order of Spenser and Shakspeare; but in what other gift and acquirement was he not first? WILLIAM COLLINS. Johnson, Joe Warton, and Tom Warton, in conference. Johnson. Poor dear Collins! the die is cast; his frightful fate seems irrecoverable. J. Warton. I am afraid so. Yet he is rational at times for a few minutes. Johnson. I thought he recognized me yesterday; I touched a favorite string, and his lips seemed to me to mutter the words, "Hah, Johnson, Johnson!" J. Warton. But they who attend him say he is always worse after he has seen old acquaintance; he becomes violent. T. Warton. A fortnight ago I had a conversation with him, in which he supported himself for above a quarter of an hour. Johnson. Were his ideas unbroken? T. Warton. No: but there was less incoherence than I could have expected. In an instant he would fly away, and lose himself, and then stop; and then a flash would come again of what had gone; and he would resume for another minute or two: and then he would drop back on his couch, and sink into tears. It was a most painful interview: it shook me awfully. Johnson. We cannot understand this part of the mental structure; it is a fearful mystery. J. Warton. It seems to me that the impressions are overlaid by the influx of some evil humors; and these the humors pass away, and the images revive; and so there is alternate darkness and light. Johnson. I wish I could analyze the subject, but I dare not attempt it. T. Warton. He was sometimes very brilliant for half an idea, and then it went out like a flash of lightning; and he seemed horrified at his own loss of light. J. Warton. I have known him sometimes cry and sob like a child. Johnson. He is grieved at the consciousness of the impotence of his own faculties. J. Warton. He had great excellence of heart. T. Warton. He was tenderness itself. Johnson. And he had a strong head too, if we could have got rid of his romantic taste. * * T. Warton. Indeed he had a wonderful combination of excellencies. United to a splendor and sublimity of imagination, he had a richness of erudition, a keenness of research, a nicety of taste, and an elegance and truth of moral reflection, which astonished those who had the luck to be intimate with him. Johnson. And yet all availed not to preserve a sound mind! O, sad humanity! O, weak, lamentable state of existence! Johnson never spoke of Collins personally without praise and fondness; but with a strange inconsistency he was severe and censorious to his writings. He imputed to them faults of fact which do not exist; such as harshness of language, and the cloy of consonants. This must have arisen from bigotry in a system of bad taste, joined perhaps by the extreme and immoral jealousy of his temper. He became the more obstinate in the force of his attack upon the literary genius of Collins, because Collins was a leader in the modern revival of this school of poetry, to which he had so habitually, and with so strong a prejudice, opposed himself. Johnson prided himself upon what he called common sense; and was an observer-not a creator: he had no refinement of sentiment, or picturesqueness of ideas; as his external senses were imperfect, his fancy was not filled with imagery; and he had no candor for that which disagreed with his own course of studies and pleasures. Collins remained many years in this state of alienation or defect of mind, till his death in 1759, in his thirty-ninth year, having died and been buried in his native city. He had some lucid intervals nearly to the last, and showed the Wartons his ode, or stanzas, on the "Superstitions of the Highlands," addressed to John Home; but he was subject to paroxysms of violence, and then his shrieks were heard in the most appalling manner echoing through the cathedral cloisters. As no fragments of his poetry are preserved, of the date of these latter days, his lucid intervals must have been of a very feeble kind. JOHN MILTON. Of this "greatest of great men" the private traits and whole life were congenial to his poetry. Men of narrow feeling will say that his political writings contradict this congeniality. His politics were, no doubt, violent and fierce; but it cannot be doubted that they were conscientious. He lived at a crisis of extraordinary public agitation, when all the principles of government were moved to their very foundations, and when there was a general desire to commence institutions de novo. His gigantic mind gave him a temper that spurned at all authority. This was his characteristic through life: it showed itself in every thought and every action, both public and private, from his earliest youth; except that he did not appear to rebel against parental authority; for nothing is more beautiful than his mild and tender expostulation to his father. His great poems require such a stretch of mind in the reader, as to be almost painful. The most amazing copiousness of learning is sublimated into all his conceptions and descriptions. His learning never oppressed his imagination; and his imagination never obliterated or dimmed his learning: but even these would not have done, without the addition of a great heart and a pure and lofty mind. That mind was given up to study and meditation from his boyhood till his death: he had no taste for the vulgar pleasures of |