"As skilful divers to the bottom fall
Swifter than those who cannot swim at all;
So, in this way of writing without thinking,
Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking."

From this reproach some clever men of the world must be excepted,
and among them Dorset himself. Though by no means great poets,
or even good versifiers, they always wrote with meaning, and
sometimes with wit. Nothing indeed more strongly shows to what a
miserable state literature had fallen, than the immense
superiority which the occasional rhymes, carelessly thrown on
paper by men of this class, possess over the elaborate
productions of almost all the professed authors. The reigning
taste was so bad, that the success of a writer was in inverse
proportion to his labour, and to his desire of excellence. An
exception must be made for Butler, who had as much wit and
learning as Cowley, and who knew, what Cowley never knew, how to
use them. A great command of good homely English distinguishes
him still more from the other writers of the time. As for
Gondibert, those may criticise it who can read it. Imagination
was extinct. Taste was depraved. Poetry, driven from palaces,
colleges, and theatres, had found an asylum in the 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.