t a late biographer of his stigmatises his first wife, the
unfortunate Mary Powell, as "a dull and common girl," without a tittle of
evidence except the bare fact of her difference with her husband, and some
innuendoes (indirect in themselves, and clearly tainted as testimony) in
Milton's own divorce tracts. On the whole, Milton's character was not an
amiable one, nor even wholly estimable. It is probable that he never in the
course of his whole life did anything that he considered wrong; but
unfortunately, examples are not far to seek of the facility with which
desire can be made to confound itself with deliberate approval. That he was
an exacting, if not a tyrannical husband and father, that he held in the
most peremptory and exaggerated fashion the doctrine of the superiority of
man to woman, that his egotism in a man who had actually accomplished less
would be half ludicrous and half disgusting, that his faculty of
appreciation beyond his own immediate tastes and interests was small, that
his intolerance surpassed that of an inquisitor, and that his controversial
habits and manners outdid the license even of that period of controversial
abuse,--these are propositions which I cannot conceive to be disputed by
any competent critic aware of the facts. If they have ever been denied, it
is merely from the amiable but uncritical point of view which blinks all a
man's personal defects in consideration of his literary genius. That we
cannot afford to do here, especially as Milton's personal defects had no
small influence on his literary character. But having honestly set down his
faults, let us now turn to the pleasanter side of the subject without fear
of having to revert, except cursorily, to the uglier.

The same prejudice and partisanship, however, which have coloured the
estimate of Milton's personal character have a little injured the literary
estimate of him. It is agreed on all hands that Johnson's acute but unjust
criticism was directed as much by political and religious prejudice as by
the operation of narrow and mistaken rules of prosody and poetry; and all
these causes worked together to produce that extraordinary verdict on
_Lycidas_, which has been thought unintelligible. But it would be idle to
contend that there is not nearly as much bias on the other side in the most
glowing of his modern panegyrists--Macaulay and Landor. It is, no doubt, in
regard to a champion so formidable, both as ally and as enemy, diffic