Some beauty must have been described in the idiom, such as
atoned for its solecism: for Milton recurs to the same idiom, and under
the same entire freedom of choice, elsewhere; particularly in this
instance, which has not been pointed out: 'And never,' says Satan to the
abhorred phantoms of Sin and Death, when crossing his path,
'And never saw till now
Sight more detestable than him and thee.'
Now, therefore, it seems, he _had_ seen a sight more detestable than
this very sight. He now looked upon something more hateful than X Y Z.
What was it? It was X Y Z.
But the authority of Milton, backed by that of insolent Greece, would
prove an overmatch for the logic of centuries. And I withdraw, therefore,
from the rash attempt to quarrel with this sort of bull, involving itself
in the verbal expression. But the following, which lies rooted in the mere
facts and incidents, is certainly the most extraordinary _practical_
bull [1] that all literature can furnish. And a stranger thing, perhaps,
than the oversight itself lies in this--that not any critic throughout
Europe, two only excepted, but has failed to detect a blunder so
memorable. All the rampant audacity of Bentley--'slashing Bentley'--all
the jealous malignity of Dr. Johnson--who hated Milton without disguise as
a republican, but secretly and under a mask _would_ at any rate have
hated him from jealousy of his scholarship--had not availed to sharpen
these practised and these interested eyes into the detection of an
oversight which argues a sudden Lethean forgetfulness on the part of
Milton; and in many generations of readers, however alive and awake with
malice, a corresponding forgetfulness not less astonishing.
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