jealous authors. Poets and artists, more susceptible than practical
men, seem to live a life of perpetual wrangle. The history of these
petty feuds is not healthy intellectual food, it is at best amusing
scandal. But these quarrels of authors do not degrade the authors in
our eyes, they only show them to be, what we knew, as vain, irritable,
and opinionative as other men. Ben Jonson, Dryden, Pope, Voltaire,
Rousseau, belabour their enemies, and we see nothing incongruous in
their doing so. It is not so when the awful majesty of Milton descends
from the empyrean throne of contemplation to use the language of the
gutter or the fish-market. The bathos is unthinkable. The universal
intellect of Bacon shrank to the paltry pursuit of place. The
disproportion between the intellectual capaciousness and the moral
aim jars upon the sense of fitness, and the name of Bacon, "wisest,
meanest," has passed into a proverb. Milton's fall is far worse. It is
not here a union of grasp of mind with an ignoble ambition, but the
plunge of the moral nature itself from the highest heights to that
despicable region of vulgar scurrility and libel, which is below the
level of average gentility and education. The name of Milton is a
synonym for sublimity. He has endowed our language with the loftiest
and noblest poetry it possesses, and the same man is found employing
speech for the most unworthy purpose to which it can be put, that of
defaming and vilifying a personal enemy, and an enemy so mean that
barely to have been mentioned by Milton had been an honour to him. In
Salmasius, Milton had at least been measuring his Latin against the
Latin of the first classicist of the age. In Alexander Morus he
wreaked august periods of Roman eloquence upon a vagabond preacher, of
chance fortunes and tarnished reputation, a _graeculus esuriens_,
who appeared against Milton by the turn of accidents, and not as the
representative of the opposite principle. In crushing Morus, Milton
could not beguile himself with the idea that he was serving a cause.