obscure
dwelling where a Great Man, born out of due season, in disgrace, penury,
pain and blindness, still kept uncontaminated a character and a genius
worthy of a better age.

Everything about Milton is wonderful; but nothing is so wonderful as
that, in an age so unfavourable to poetry, he should have produced the
greatest of modern epic poems. We are not sure that this is not in
some degree to be attributed to his want of sight. The imagination is
notoriously most active when the external world is shut out. In sleep
its illusions are perfect. They produce all the effect of realities. In
darkness its visions are always more distinct than in the light. Every
person who amuses himself with what is called building castles in the
air must have experienced this. We know artists who, before they attempt
to draw a face from memory, close their eyes, that they may recall a
more perfect image of the features and the expression. We are therefore
inclined to believe that the genius of Milton may have been preserved
from the influence of times so unfavourable to it by his infirmity.
Be this as it may, his works at first enjoyed a very small share of
popularity. To be neglected by his contemporaries was the penalty which
he paid for surpassing them. His great poem was not generally studied or
admired till writers far inferior to him had, by obsequiously cringing
to the public taste, acquired sufficient favour to reform it.

Of these, Dryden was the most eminent. Amidst the crowd of authors who,
during the earlier years of Charles the Second, courted notoriety
by every species of absurdity and affectation, he speedily became
conspicuous. No man exercised so much influence on the age. The reason
is obvious. On no man did the age exercise so much influence. He was
perhaps the greatest of those whom we have designated as the critical
poets; and his literary career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the
whole history of the school to which he belonged,--the rudeness and
extravagance of its infancy,--the propriety, the grace, the dignified
good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity. His imagination
was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment. He began with quaint
parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually acquired the energy of the
satirist, the gravity of the moralist, the rapture of the lyric poet.
The revolution through which English literature has been passing, from
the time of Cowley to that of Scott, may be seen in minia