Especially are we indebted to him for his modest and admirable criticism of the _Paradise Lost_ in the _Spectator_.
Of those few poems to which I have referred, I choose the best known, because it is the best.

It has to me a charm for which I can hardly account.
Yet I imagine I see in it a sign of the poetic times: a flatness of spirit, arising from the evanishment of the mystical element, begins to result in a worship of power.

Neither power nor wisdom, though infinite both, could constitute a God worthy of the worship of a human soul; and the worship of such a God must sink to the level of that fancied divinity.

Small wonder is it then that the lyric should now droop its wings and moult the feathers of its praise.

I do not say that God's more glorious attributes are already forgotten, but that the tendency of the Christian lyric is now to laudation of power--and knowledge, a form of the same--as _the_ essential of Godhead.