too, he delights to reveal
himself, to take the knowing reader into his confidence, to honour the
fit audience with a confession.

But the difficulty is there none the less. Few critics have found Milton
too wide or too large for them; many have found him too narrow, which is
another form of imperfect sympathy. His lack of humour has alienated the
interest of thousands. His ardent advocacy of toleration in the noblest
of his prose treatises has been belittled by a generation which prides
itself on that flaccid form of benevolence, and finds the mere repeal of
the Licensing Act the smallest part of it. His pamphlets on divorce and
on government have earned him the reputation of a theorist and dreamer.
The shrewd practical man finds it easy to despise him. The genial
tolerant man, whose geniality of demeanour towards others is a kind of
quit-rent paid for his own moral laxity, regards him as a Pharisee. The
ready humourist devises a pleasant and cheap entertainment by dressing
Adam and Eve in modern garments and discussing their relations in the
jargon of modish frivolity. Even the personal history of the poet has
been made to contribute to the gaiety of nations, and the flight of Mary
Powell, the first Mrs. Milton, from the house in Aldersgate Street, has
become something of a stock comic episode in the history of English
literature. So heavy is the tax paid, even by a poet, for deficiency in
breadth and humour. Almost all men are less humorous than Shakespeare;
but most men are more humorous than Milton, and these, it is to be
feared, having suffered themselves to be dragooned by the critics into
professing a distant admiration for _Paradise Lost_, have paid their last
and utmost tribute to the genius of its author.

It may be admitted without hesitation that his lonely greatness rather
forces admiration on us than attracts us. That unrelenting intensity;
that lucidity, as clear as air and as hard as agate; that passion which
burns with a consuming heat or with a blinding light in all his writings,
have endeared him to none. It is impossible to take one's ease with
Milton, to induce him to forget his principles for a moment in the name
of social pleasure. The most genial of his personal sonnets is addressed
to Henry Lawrence, the son of the President of Cromwell's Council, and is
an invitation to dinner. The repast promised is "light and choice"; the
guest is apostrophised, somewhat formidably, as "Lawrence, of virtuous