AEschylus or
Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art
to a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr. Wordsworth observes, has in
a manner "created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed." To sketch the
history of the art, and to examine its principles critically, now remains
as a duty for the connoisseur, and for judges of quite another stamp from
his Majesty's Judges of Assize.

Before I begin, let me say a word or two to certain prigs, who affect to
speak of our society as if it were in some degree immoral in its tendency.
Immoral! God bless my soul, gentlemen, what is it that people mean? I am
for morality, and always shall be, and for virtue and all that; and I do
affirm, and always shall, (let what will come of it,) that murder is an
improper line of conduct, highly improper; and I do not stick to assert,
that any man who deals in murder, must have very incorrect ways of
thinking, and truly inaccurate principles; and so far from aiding and
abetting him by pointing out his victim's hiding-place, as a great
moralist[1] of Germany declared it to be every good man's duty to do, I
would subscribe one shilling and sixpense to have him apprehended, which is
more by eighteen-pence than the most eminent moralists have subscribed for
that purpose. But what then? Everything in this world has two handles.
Murder, for instance, may be laid hold of by its moral handle, (as it
generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old Bailey;) and _that_, I confess,
is its weak side; or it may also be treated _aesthetically_, as the Germans
call it, that is, in relation to good taste.

[Footnote 1: Kant--who carried his demands of unconditional veracity to so
extravagant a length as to affirm, that, if a man were to see an innocent
person escape from a murderer, it would be his duty, on being questioned
by the murderer, to tell the truth, and to point out the retreat of the
innocent person, under any certainty of causing murder. Lest this doctrine
should be supposed to have escaped him in any heat of dispute, on being
taxed with it by a celebrated French writer, he solemnly reaffirmed it,
with his reasons.]

To illustrate this, I will urge the authority of three eminent persons,
viz., S.T. Coleridge, Aristotle, and Mr. Howship the surgeon. To begin with
S.T.C. One night, many years ago, I was drinking tea with him in Berners'
Street, (which, by the way, for a short street, has been uncommonly
fruitful in men of