EpilogueSouthey elaborated on and added to Dr Johnson’s criticisms of Milton, Thomas De
Quincey offered a spirited defense of his poems and prose works.
Victorian poets and critics were usually more restrained and more selective than
the Romantics in their responses to Milton. Some honored him as a republican and
a lover of liberty. Extracts from Tenure, Eikonoklastes, and The Readie and Easie Way
appeared in several Chartist tracts, new editions of his prose praised his heroic
patriotism, and David Masson’s six-volume biography provided a richly detailed
and sympathetic account of his life and times. In 1825 Thomas Macaulay produced
a long panegyric essay on Milton and his works, prompted by the shocked reactions
of some contemporaries to the Arianism and other heterodoxies in the newly dis-
covered De Doctrina Christiana. Those, he declared, should not surprise any careful
reader of Paradise Lost. Macaulay terms Milton “the glory of English literature, the
champion and the martyr of English liberty,” praising him especially for recogniz-
ing, in Areopagitica, the horrors of intellectual slavery and the benefits of a free press
in promoting “the unfettered exercise of private judgment.”^3 He honored Milton’s
personal triumph over the greatest difficulties and saw the same qualities in his
“wonderful” Satan, whom he thought superior even to Prometheus in energy and
noble endurance. Ranking Milton’s two epics above all subsequent poems, he val-
ued especially Milton’s ability, despite age, anxiety, and disappointment, to adorn
Paradise Lost with “all that is most lovely and delightful in the physical and in the
moral world.” By contrast, Matthew Arnold deprecated Milton’s character, most of
his prose works, and the subject matter of his epic as products of the Hebraic spirit
nurtured by Puritanism. But he thought that spirit often countered in Milton’s
poetry by the Hellenic influence, making for a patchwork of dazzling lines, splen-
did passages, and an unfailingly sublime poetic style. He includes several short pas-
sages from Paradise Lost among his touchstones of highest poetic quality, by which
he would have readers form their taste and critical judgment.
Among the Victorian poets, both Arnold and Tennyson at times imitated Milton’s
blank verse and his diction. In an elegantly crafted poem in alcaics entitled Milton,
Tennyson paid tribute to Milton’s sublime style – “O mighty-mouthed inventor of
harmonies, /... God-gifted organ voice of England.” Gerard Manley Hopkins
valued Milton’s art, and especially the rhythm and metrics of Paradise Regained and
Samson, above that of any other poetry in any language: terming Milton “the great
standard in the use of counterpoint,” he pointed to the choruses of Samson Agonistes
as a forerunner of his own sprung rhythm.^4 Among the Victorian novelists, George
Eliot felt his impress strongly. She thought his tractate on education and his divorce
tracts especially relevant for her own era, and her novels often refer to or allude to
Milton in treating issues of experience and moral choice. In Middlemarch Dorothea
Brooke compares herself to Milton’s daughters when she decides to marry Casaubon
so as to assist him with a great intellectual project, though unlike them she expects
by doing so to gain wisdom herself; the novel explores the disastrous consequences
of her inexperience and naiveté in mistaking the pedant Casaubon for a Milton