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who in 1699 had been granted a pension of £300 in order that he might travel in preparation for diplomatic life, had lost it in 1702, when his friends went out of office. The battle of Blenheim, as we say, brought him into fame, however. It was John Philips who sounded the praises of Blenheim from the Tory side, or, as Dr. Johnson puts it, "with occult opposition to Addison.”* Here is an ex

ample of his manner :

"Now from each van

The brazen instruments of death discharge
Horrible flames, and turbid streaming clouds
Of smoke sulphureous; intermix'd with these
Large globous irons fly, of dreadful hiss,
Singeing the air, and from long distance bring
Surprising slaughter. . . by sudden burst
Disploding murderous bowels, fragments of steel,
And stones and glass, and nitrous grain adust:
A thousand ways at once the shiver'd orbs
Fly diverse, working torment and foul rout."

As a not unnatural consequence,

"Unmanly dread invades

The French astonied; straight their useless arms

They quit, and in ignoble flight confide,

Unseemly yelling; distant hills return

The hideous noise."

It is not necessary to read more. You will notice that the lines are written in blank verse of the Miltonic pattern. And Philips, I may say by the way, was one of the first of the English poets to abandon the couplet and to take to the rival measure. In it he wrote the "Splendid Shilling," a burlesque, and a fifth Georgic, on "Cider," which

* Addison had tried his hand at the imitation of Milton, but without much success. Vide a piece out of Æn. iii. (Bohn's edition of Addison's

Works, i. 38).

has been said to be a sound manual of instruction for the farmer. It may be doubted, however, whether the farmer would gather from these few lines that he was told to pick off superfluous fruit :

"The wise

Spare not the little offsprings if they grow
Redundant, but the thronging clusters thin
By kind avulsion, else the starveling brood,
Void of sufficient sustenance, will yield
A slender autumn, which the niggard soul

Too late shall weep, and curse his thrifty hand,

That would not timely ease the ponderous boughs."

The general reader will find his profit, too, in studying the poem :

"Nor from the sable ground expect success,
Nor from cretaceous, stubborn, and jejune;
The must of pallid hue declares the soil
Devoid of spirit: wretched he that quaffs
Such wheyish liquors! oft with colic pangs,
With pungent colic pangs, distrest he'll roar,

And toss, and turn, and curse th' unwholesome draught."*

We shall see plenty of examples of this so-called Miltonic way of writing, as in Thomson's "Seasons," Cowper, Wordsworth, to name a few of the most prominent. Dr. Johnson bitterly opposed blank verse, and in his life of John Philips he said "he imitated Milton's numbers indeed, but imitates them very injudiciously. Deformity is easily copied; and whatever there is in Milton which the reader wishes away, all that is obsolete, peculiar, or licentious ist accumulated with great care by Philips. Milton's verse was harmonious, in proportion to the general state of our metre in Milton's age; and if he had written after the improvements made by Dryden, it is reasonable to believe

*The poem was translated into Italian. This kind of writing was admired then, and previously, in Italy.

he would have admitted a more pleasing modulation of numbers into his work." This was the statement of a prejudiced man, but it is interesting to see what may be thought and stated with approbation in another time than

our own.

At any rate, it will be clear that Addison did not have a serious rival in this miniature Milton. Philips, we are told, had admired Milton from his tender youth, but those who followed him doubtless belonged to the romantic half of mankind, who revolted from the reasonableness of those who clung to the heroic measure. Reasonableness had charms for Addison. In his preparations for diplomacy he made the usual tour of Europe, and, like many since his time, and a few before, he wrote a book about his travels. This volume has no great merit, although the descriptions are even now precise. As Doudan said, although Italy had not then been wholly cut up by the railroad, it seems as if not a nail had been driven in all Italy since Addison visited it. But a good many things have been driven into the heads of travellers since Addison went to Italy and compared the country, as he found it, with the descriptions he recalled from the Latin poets.

II. Nowadays the traveller who finds himself before St. Mark's in Venice dilates with various emotions. He has Ruskin's "Seven Lamps" and the "Stones of Venice" in his hand-bag, and the fact that he has learned to admire other things in architecture than the works of the ancients and the classical imitations of the Renaissance is another instance of the vicissitudes of taste. What was the rigorously enforced view of the times we are discussing, we may see, for instance, in Bishop Burnet's "Letters from Switzerland, Italy, and Some Parts of Germany, in the Years 1685 and 1686" (Rotterdam, 1687), p. 128. The worthy bishop says: "St. Mark's Church hath noth

ing to recommend it, but its great Antiquity, and the vast Riches of the Building, it is dark and low; but the pavement is so rich a Mosaick, and the whole roof is also Mosaick, the outside and inside are of such excellent Marble, the Frontispiece is adorned with so many Pillars of Porphyry and Jasper, and above all with the four Horses of Corinthian Brass,” etc.,“ that when all this is considered, one doth no where see so much cost brought together." "The Dome of Milan," he says, "hath nothing to commend it of Architecture, it being built in the rude Gothic manner" (p. 103).

Addison says of the beautiful cathedral at Sienna : "There is nothing in this City so extraordinary as the Cathedral, which a man may view with pleasure after he has seen St. Peter's, tho' 'tis quite of another make, and can only be looked upon as one of the Masterpieces of Gothic architecture. When a man sees the prodigious pains and expense that our forefathers have been at in these barbarous buildings, one cannot but fancy to himself what miracles of architecture they would have left us, had they only been instructed in the right way; for when the devotion of those ages was much warmer than it is at present, and the riches of the people much more at the disposal of the priests, there was so much money consumed on these Gothic cathedrals, as would have finished a greater variety of noble buildings than have been raised either before or since that time." He then goes on to describe the very spouts, "loaden with ornaments;" the windows, "formed like so many scenes of perspective, with a multitude of little pillars retiring one behind another;" the great "columns" finely engraven with fruits and foliage "that run twisting about them from the very top to the bottom;" the whole body of the church "chequered with different lays of white and black marble ;"

the pavement "curiously cut out in designs and Scripturestories and the Fruit cut with such a variety of figures and over-run with so many little mazes and labyrinths of Sculpture, that nothing in the world can make a prettier show to those who prefer false beauties and affected ornaments to a noble and majestic simplicity.”

Addison and Burnet did but express the average opinion of their time* just as we all do when we praise what

*A century earlier these prejudices had not come into existence. Montaigne, in 1580, calls the cathedral at Florence " a magnificent structure, one of the finest and most sumptuous churches in the world." See his account in his "Journey into Italy," iv. 284 and 290. Of Sienna, he says, "The cathedral church is very little inferior to that of Florence."

Lyly's "Euphues and his England," 1580, Arber's Reprint, p. 251: "But first they came to Canterbury, an olde Citie-somewhat decayed, yet beautiful to behold, most famous for a Catholic Church, the very Majestie whereoff stroke them into a maze."

Coryat in his "Crudities" (edition 1611, p. 98) calls Milan cathedral an "exceedingly glorious and beautiful church," and that at Amiens, "the queene of al the churches in France and the fairest that ever I saw till then (Id. p. 12). Notice, too, his wild enthusiasm over the piazza and church of St. Mark's (Id. pp. 171–216).

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Evelyn, even as late as Oct. 25, 1644, says: "The Domo or Cathedral, both without and within, is of large square stones of black and white marble polished, of inexpressible beauty, as is the front adorned with sculptures and rare statues. . . . The pulpit is beautified with marble figures, a piece of exquisite work;" and the next May, "dined at Sienna where we could not pass admiring the great church."

Of St. Mark's he said: "The Cathedral is also Gothic, yet for the preciousness of the materials," etc., "far exceeding any in Rome, St. Peter's hardly excepted." "I much admired the splendid history of our Blessed Saviour, composed all of mosaic. . . . The roof is of most excellent mosaic." "After all that is said, this church is in my opinion much too dark and dismal and of heavy work." The prejudice against Gothic work was not so bitter then as it became after the Restoration. Evelyn also visited the cathedrals of Rouen and of Pisa. The latter, he says, is superb. All the English cathedrals he admired warmly, Canterbury, Gloucester,

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