The question in the last line, is easily answered. If in no other way, by the ridiculous death of Polycrates' minion, the immortal Anacreon, who lost his mortality through the agency of an ingrate grape stone.
IX. To praise such men as Shakspeare and Milton, is like praising Hercules. However, I am not one of those who think it idle to cry out "O deare moon, O choyce stars!" when we look upon these in their loveliness. And, leaving this question of the utility or inutility of panegyric, to be discussed elsewhere, I will continue _pari passu_ upon the same track which I have hitherto pursued.--Of,
"A genius universal as his theme; Astonishing as chaos; as the bloom Of blowing Eden, fair; as heaven, sublime,"
Milton was fully equal to the vast labor, at his daring in undertaking which, his friend old Andrew Marvel so marvelled. Like Amphion, he sung of the wonders of creation; of Gods and immortal essences. His Satan is a magnificent creation; a personification of all gloom and all grandeur. Vast strength, angelic fashioning, revenge that nothing can soothe, endurance that never shrinks, the intellect of heaven and the pride of earth, ambition immeasurably high, and a courage which quails not even before God, go to constitute a creation essentially _ideal_. Satan is not like Macbeth or Lear, real in himself, literally true, and only lifted into poetry by circumstance: but he is altogether moulded in a dream of the imagination. Heaven, and earth, and hell, are explored for gifts to make him eminent and peerless. He is compounded of all; and at last stands up before us, with the starry grandeur of darkness upon his forehead, but having the passions of clay within his heart, and his home and foundation in the depths below. It is thus gleaning, as it were, from every element, and compounding them all in one grand design, which constitutes the poetry of the character. Perhaps Ariel and Caliban are as purely ideal, as the hero of Milton, and approach as nearly to him as any other fiction; but the latter is incontestably a grander formation, and a mightier agent, and moves through the perplexities of his career, with a power that defies competition. And these are his comrades of Pandemonium: Moloch, who changed the pleasant valley of Hinnom into black Gehenna; Belial, the "manna tongued," than whom "a fairer person lost not heaven;" Azaziel, Chemos, Peor, and the wonderful Astarte;