Page:Table-Talk, vol. 2 (1822).djvu/34

 feasting and luxurious display, they will go in the character of livery-servants to stand behind the chairs of the great. There are others who can so little bear to be left for any length of time out of the grand carnival and masquerade of pride and folly, that they will gain admittance to it at the expense of their characters as well as of a change of dress. Milton was not one of these. He had too much of the ideal faculty in his composition, a lofty contemplative principle, and consciousness of inward power and worth, to be tempted by such idle baits. We have plenty of chanting and chiming in among some modern writers with the triumphs over their own views and principles; but none of a patient resignation to defeat, sustaining and nourishing itself with the thought of the justice of their cause, and with firm-fixed rectitude. I do not pretend to defend the tone of Milton’s political writings (which was borrowed from the style of controversial divinity), or to say that he was right in the part he took,—I say that he was consistent in it, and did not convict himself of error: he was consistent in it in spite of danger and obloquy, “on evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,” and therefore his character has the salt of honesty about it. It does not offend in the nostrils of posterity. He had taken his