notions and feelings of another, may be a refined gentleman, but must be
a sorry critic. He who possesses imagination enough to live with his
forefathers, and, leaving comparative reflection for an after moment, to
give himself up during the first perusal to the feelings of a
contemporary, if not a partizan, will, I dare aver, rarely find any part
of Milton's prose works disgusting.

(Hayley, p. 104. Hayley is speaking of the passage in Milton's Answer to
Icon Basilice, in which he accuses Charles of taking his Prayer in
captivity from Pamela's prayer in the 3rd book of Sidney's Arcadia. The
passage begins,--

"But this king, not content with that which, although in a thing holy,
is no holy theft, to attribute to his own making other men's whole
prayers, &c." Symmons' ed. 1806, p. 407.)

Assuredly, I regret that Milton should have written this passage; and
yet the adoption of a prayer from a romance on such an occasion does not
evince a delicate or deeply sincere mind. We are the creatures of
association. There are some excellent moral and even serious lines in
Hudibras; but what if a clergyman should adorn his sermon with a
quotation from that poem! Would the abstract propriety of the verses
leave him "honourably acquitted?" The Christian baptism of a line in
Virgil is so far from being a parallel, that it is ridiculously
inappropriate,--an absurdity as glaring as that of the bigotted
Puritans, who objected to some of the noblest and most scriptural
prayers ever dictated by wisdom and piety, simply because the Roman
Catholics had used them.

(Hayley, p. 107.) "The ambition of Milton," &c.