Taormina and other Poems. (T. Cantley Newby.)—The author of these
precious compositions ventures to denounce Milton as a "cold selfish despot in his home," and to say of him that,— " Trampling on free affection, he preferred A servile flatterer's mercenary wiles."
He is, moreover, very angry that Milton did not leave his daughters a fortune. The person who could print these groundless libels against a man whose life was a model of purity, who for the grandest poem in the language received only 201., and whose later years were passed in the enforced inactivity of total blindness, is, if these verses may be trusted, not devoid of a certain dreamy, listless, purposeless sense of beauty. But as was to be expected, the poems have neither vigour nor intelligible object, and are full of a maudlin sorrow without cause unless it be his sense of his own weakness. He says, —
"My brain is steeped in tears, faint anguish steals Subduing sense ; but dim oblivion's plume
Droops heavily o'er all—
Fain thus to fade in night and endless quiet," and very deservedly too.
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