No good man can, with impunity, addict himself to party. And the best
men will suffer most, because their conviction of the goodness of
their cause is deeper. But when one with the sensibility of a poet
throws himself into the excitements of a struggle, he is certain to
lose his balance. The endowment of feeling and imagination which
qualifies him to be the ideal interpreter of life, unfits him
for participation in that real life, through the manoeuvres and
compromises of which reason is the only guide, and where imagination
is as much misplaced as it would be in a game of chess. "The ennobling
difference between one man and another is that one feels more than
another." Milton's capacity of emotion, when once he became champion
of a cause, could not be contained within the bounds of ordinary
speech. It breaks into ferocious reprobation, into terrific blasts of
vituperation, beneath which the very language creaks, as the timbers
of a ship in a storm. Corruptio optimi pessima. The archangel
is recognisable by the energy of his malice. Were all those
accomplishments; those many studious years hiving wisdom, the
knowledge of all the tongues, the command of all the thoughts of
all the ages, and that wealth of English expression--were all these
acquirements only of use, that their possessor might vie in defamation
with an Edwards or a Du Moulin?

For it should be noted that these pamphlets, now only serving as a
record of the prostitution of genius to political party, were, at the
time at which they appeared, of no use to the cause in which they
were written. Writers, with a professional tendency to magnify their
office, have always been given to exaggerate the effect of printed
words. There are examples of thought having been influenced by
books. But such books have been scientific, not rhetorical. Milton's