Take any--the most hackneyed passage of 'Comus,' the 'Allegro,' the
'Penseroso,' the 'Paradise Lost,' and see the freshness, the
sweetness, the simplicity which is strangely combined with the pomp,
the self-restraint, the earnestness of every word; take him even, as
an experimentum crucis, when he trenches upon ground heathen and
questionable, and tries the court poets at their own weapons -


'Or whether (as some sager sing),
The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
Zephyr, with Aurora playing,
As he met her once a-Maying,
There on beds of violets blue,
And fresh-blown roses washed in dew--'


but why quote what all the world knows?--where shall we find such
real mirth, ease, sweetness, dance and song of words in anything
written for five and twenty years before him? True, he was no great
dramatist. He never tried to be one; but there was no one in his
generation who could have written either 'Comus' or 'Samson
Agonistes.' And if, as is commonly believed, and as his countenance
seems to indicate, he was deficient in humour, so were his
contemporaries, with the sole exception of Cartwright. Witty he
could be, and bitter; but he did not live in a really humorous age:
and if he has none of the rollicking fun of the foxhound puppy, at
least he has none of the obscene gibber of the ape.