e
title of "The State of Innocence and Fall of Man," which may also be
interpreted as referring to the condition of the poem before Dryden laid
hands upon it and afterwards. It is a puzzling performance altogether;
one sees not any more than Sir Walter Scott could see how a drama
requiring paradisiacal costume could have been acted even in the age of
Nell Gwyn; and yet it is even more unlikely that Dryden should have
written a play not intended for the stage. The same contradiction
prevails in the piece itself; it would not be unfair to call it the most
absurd burlesque ever written without burlesque intention; and yet it
displays such intellectual resources, such vigour, bustle, adroitness,
and bright impudence, that admiration almost counterweighs derision.
Dryden could not have made such an exhibition of Milton and himself
twenty years afterwards, when he said that, much as he had always
admired Milton, he felt that he had not admired him half enough. The
reverence which he felt even in 1674 for "one of the greatest, most
noble, and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has
produced," contrasts finely with the ordinary Restoration estimate of
Milton conveyed in the complimentary verses by Lee, prefixed to "The
State of Innocence":--

"To the dead bard your fame a little owes,
For Milton did the wealthy mine disclose,
And rudely cast what you could well dispose.
He roughly drew, on an old-fashioned ground,
A chaos, for no perfect world was found,
Till through the heap your mighty genius shined;
He was the golden ore, which you refined."

These later years also produced several little publications of Milton's
own, mostly of manuscripts long lying by him, now slightly revised and
fitted for the press. Such were his miniature Latin grammar, published
in 1669; and his "Artis Logicae Plenior Institutio; or The Method of
Ramus," 1672. The first is insignificant; and the second even Professor
Masson pronounces, "as a digest of logic, disorderly and unedifying."
Both apparently belong to his school-keeping days: the little tract, "Of
True Religion, Heresy, Schism, Toleration," (1673) is, on the other
hand, contemporary with a period of great public excitement, when
Parliament (March, 1673) compelled the king to revoke his edict of
toleration autocratically promulgated in the preceding year, and to
assent to a severe Test Act against Roman Catholics. The good sense and
good nature wh