keray says on the same subjects in the twenty-fourth chapter of
_Pendennis_, entitled 'The Pall Mall Gazette.' This brochure is evidently
modelled on Swift's 'Digression Concerning Critics' in the third section
of the _Tale of a Tub_, and owes something also to the _Treatise on the
Bathos_ in Pope's and Swift's _Miscellanies_, as the title may have been
suggested by Shaftesbury's _Advice to an Author_. The _Advice_ itself and
the supplementary critique of Milton are clever and have good points, but
they will not bear comparison with the satire of Swift and Pope.

The excerpt which comes next in this Miscellany links with the name of
the author of the _Essay of Dramatic Poesy_ the name of the most
illustrious of his contemporaries. The difference, indeed, between Milton
and Dryden is a difference not in degree merely, but in kind, so
immeasurably distant and alien is the sphere in which they moved and
worked both as men and as writers. It has sometimes been questioned
whether Dryden is a poet. Few would dispute that Milton divides with
Shakespeare the supremacy in English poetry. In Dryden as a man there is
little to attract or interest us. In character and in private life he
appears to have been perfectly commonplace. We close his biography, and
our curiosity is satisfied. With Milton it is far otherwise. We feel
instinctively that he belongs to the demi-gods of our race. We have the
same curiosity about him as we have about Homer, Aeschylus, and
Shakespeare, so that the merest trifles which throw any light on his
personality assume an interest altogether out of proportion to their
intrinsic importance. Our debt to Ellwood is, it must be admitted, much
less than it might have been, if he had thought a little more of Milton
and a little less of his somewhat stupid self and the sect to which he
belonged. But, as the proverb says, we must not look a gift-horse in the
mouth, and we are the richer for the Quaker's reminiscences. With
Ellwood's work, the _History of Thomas Ellwood, written by Himself_, we
are only concerned so far as it bears on his relation with Milton. Born
in 1639, the son of a small squire and justice of the peace at Crowell in
Oxfordshire, Ellwood had, in 1659, been persuaded by Edward Burrough, one
of the most distinguished of Fox's followers, to join the Quakers. He was
in his twenty-fourth year when he first met Milton. Milton was then living
in Jewin Street, having removed from his former lodging in Ho