Samuel Johnson comments on Milton's reading and applies Ben Jonson's unfavorable remark about Spenser's diction to John Milton, "made by exalted genius and extensive learning the vehicle of so much instruction and so much pleasure that, like other lovers, we find grace in its deformity."
Edmund Cartwright: "Of this truly excellent analysis and criticism, it is scarcely hyperbolical to affirm that it is executed with all the skill and penetration of Aristotle, and animated and embellished with all the fire of Longinus. It is every way worthy of its subject: the Paradise Lost is a poem which the mind of Milton only could have produced; the criticism before us is such as, perhaps, the pen of Johnson only could have written" Monthly Review 61 (August 1779) 92.
Hannah More: "I praised Lycidas, which he absolutely abused, adding, 'if Milton had not written the Paradise Lost, he would have only ranked among the minor poets: he was a Phidias that could cut a Colossus out of a rock, but could not cut heads out of cherry stones" 1781; in Memoirs of Hannah More (1835) 1:125.
William Cowper to William Unwin: "As a poet, he has treated him [Milton] with severity enough, and has plucked one or two of the most beautiful feathers out of his Muse's wing, and trampled them under his great foot. He has passed sentence of condemnation upon Lycidas, and has taken occasion, from that charming poem, to expose to ridicule (what is indeed ridiculous enough) the childish prattlement of pastoral compositions, as if Lycidas was the prototype and pattern of them all" 31 October 1779; in Hayley, Life of Cowper (1803-04, 1806) 1:155-56.
Samuel Egerton Brydges: "His private feelings hesitated between Dryden and Pope; and all the praise he has given to Milton, or Cowley, or Akenside, or Collins, or Gray, is extorted, penurious, and mixed with every degrading touch that the ingenuity of his acute mind, and force of his energetic language could introduce. The public received these lives with ill-tempered avidity. They who had never known what it was to be warmed by the flights of fancy; in whose torpid heads the description of Eden, the wailings over Lycidas, and all the imagery of Comus never raised one corresponding idea, but who concealed their lamentable deficiences of mind before the awful name of Milton; now that they were sanctioned by Johnson, boldly gloried in their want of taste. All the gall which they had so long been nourishing in their hearts was now vomited forth without restraint, and the cry, which dulness had always secretly disseminated against the aberrations of genius, was avowed as the acknowledged dictate of sense and truth" Censura Literaria 1 (1805) 386-87.
Percival Stockdale: "Nothing can be imagined more petulant, and unjust than Johnson's remarks on Milton's Lycidas. He treats the whole with a supercilious contempt; which is so destitute of foundation, that I will not waste your time, and mine, by giving it my particular animadversion. For this glaring injustice to Lycidas, I have two reasons in my eye, which I think almost incontrovertible. Johnson, plainly, from party motives, is, on many occasions, industrious to depress both the moral, and poetical reputation of Milton. And our poet, in this elegy, takes an opportunity severely to censure, and expose the indolence, and epicureism; and the necessarily concomitant dullness, of the superiour clergy. Now, it is well known that Johnson as a high-churchman, was an archbishop Laud; without the excuse of having lived in his bigoted, and superstitious age. Indeed, his latter reason for tearing this unfortunate pastoral to pieces, is evident from a passage in his life of Milton, where he mentions the year in which Lycidas was published. He says that 'his malignity to the church may be discovered by some lines which are interpreted, as threatening its extermination'" Lectures on the truly eminent English Poets (1807) 1:192-93.
William Hazlitt: "Dr. Johnson's general remark, that Milton's genius had not room to shew itself in his smaller pieces, is not well-founded. Not to mention Lycidas, the Allegro and Penseroso, it proceeds on a false estimate of the merits of his great work, which is not more distinguished by strength and sublimity than by tenderness and beauty. — The last were as essential qualities of Milton's mind as the first. The battle of the angels, which has been generally considered as the best part of the Paradise Lost, is the worst" The Examiner (6 August 1815) 509.
Sir James Mackintosh: "a Life of Milton, written by a zealous opponent of his principles, in the relation of events which so much exasperate the passions, almost inevitably degenerates into a libel. The constant hostility of a biographer to the subject of his narrative, whether it be just or not, is teazing and vexatious. The natural frailty of over-partiality is a thousand times more agreeable" Review of Godwin, Lives of Milton's Nephews; Edinburgh Review 25 (October 1815) 495.
Robert Southey: "A life of Milton is yet a desideratum in our literature. Johnson hated his democratic principles, and despised his impracticable philosophy: the severity with which he handled him was only restrained by a veneration for his piety, and perhaps ignorance of his arianism" review of Todd's Milton, Quarterly Review 36 (1827) 42.
Thomas Babington Macaulay: "He was undoubtedly an excellent judge of compositions fashioned on his own principles. But when a deeper philosophy was required, — when he undertook to pronounce judgment on the works of those great minds which "yield homage only to eternal laws," — his failure was ignominious. He criticized Pope's Epitaphs excellently. But his observations on Shakspeare's plays and Milton's poems seem to us for the most part as wretched as if they had been written by Rymer himself, whom we take to have been the worst critic that ever lived" "Croker's Boswell" Edinburgh Review 54 (September 1831) 32-33.
John Wilson: "Ben Johnson, alluding, we presume, rather to the Shepherd's Calendar than the Faerie Queen, though perhaps to both, said to Drummond, "in Roslin's classic shade," that Spenser "wrote no language at all;" and Sam Johnson, improving on Ben, some century or so afterwards said almost the same of Milton" Blackwood's Magazine 34 (1833) 809.
Mark Pattison: Lycidas, "unmatched in the whole range of English poetry, and never again equalled by Milton himself, leaves all criticism behind. Indeed so high is the poetic note here reached, that the common ear fails to catch it. Lycidas is the touchstone of taste; the 18th century criticism could not make anything of it. The very form of the poem is a stumbling-block to the common-sense critic" The English Poets, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward (1880) 2:299.
David Nichol Smith: "The passage on Lycidas is generally regarded as an error of judgment which marks Johnson's limitations as a critic. With his usual courage, he stated a deliberate opinion. He gave his reasons — the artificiality of the pastoral convention, the confusion of the allegory with actual fact and sacred truth, and the absence of the feeling of real sorrow. But there is the further explanation that he was opposed to some recent tendencies in English poetry. That he had more than Lycidas in mind is shown by the emphasis of his statement. The same ideas reappear in his criticism of Collins and Gray. He objected to the habit of inverting the common order of words, and, on one occasion, cited Thomas Warton's 'evening gray'; he might also have cited 'mantle blue'" Cambridge History of English Literature (1913) 10:209.
Oliver Elton: "Johnson's behaviour towards Milton and Gray would demand a long discussion. These were the Lives that were most sharply attacked; and the Philistine passages are too well known to quote. Gillray's caricature (1782) of 'Old Wisdom blinking at the stars' depicts the sage as a horned owl, sitting with a disapproving air underneath the busts of Milton and Pope. Johnson's antipathies as a Tory and a churchman to Milton are easily understood. His insensibility to Lycidas, which he cannot believe expresses true grief, only shows that he could not, like Keats, seize the nuance of of 'fair-haired Milton's eloquent distress.' But he melts into sympathy, and even into tenderness, in describing the poet's old age; and his praises of Paradise Lost are not merely extorted" Survey of English Literature 1730-1780 (1928) 1:147.
Of the English poets he set most value upon Spenser, Shakespeare, and Cowley. Spenser was apparently his favourite; Shakespeare he may easily be supposed to like, with every other skilful reader, but I should not have expected Cowley, whose ideas of excellence were different from his own, would have had much of his approbation. His character of Dryden, who sometimes visited him, was that he was a good rhymist, by no poet....
Of him, at last, may be said what Jonson says of Spenser, that 'he wrote no language,' but has formed what Butler calls 'a Babylonish Dialect,' in itself harsh and barbarous, but made by exalted genius and extensive learning the vehicle of so much instruction and so much pleasure that, like other lovers, we find grace in its deformity....
