Through all his greater works there prevails an uniform peculiarity of Diction, a mode and cast of expression which bears little resemblance to that of any former writer, and which is so far removed from common use, that an unlearned reader, when he first opens his book, finds himself surprised by a new language.

This novelty has been, by those who can find nothing wrong in Milton, imputed to his laborious endeavours after words suitable to the grandeur of his ideas. Our language, 10 says Addison, sunk under him. But the truth is, that, both in prose and verse, he had formed his style by a perverse and pedantick principle. He was desirous to use English words with a foreign idiom. This in all his prose is discovered and condemned; for there judgement operates freely, neither softened by the beauty, nor awed by the dignity of his thoughts; but such is the power of his poetry, that his call is obeyed without resistance, the reader feels himself in captivity to a higher and a nobler mind, and criticism sinks in admiration.

20

Milton's style was not modified by his subject: what is shewn with greater extent in Paradise Lost, may be found in Comus. One source of his peculiarity was his familiarity with the Tuscan poets: the disposition of his words is, I think, frequently Italian; perhaps sometimes combined with other tongues. 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, 30 that, like other lovers, we find grace in its deformity.

Whatever be the faults of his diction, he cannot want the praise of copiousness and variety: he was master of his language in its full extent; and has selected the melodious words with such diligence, that from his book alone the Art of English Poetry might be learned.

After his diction, something must be said of his versifica

tion. The measure, he says, is the English heroick verse without rhyme. Of this mode he had many examples among the Italians, and some in his own country. The Earl of Surrey is said to have translated one of Virgil's books without rhyme; and, besides our tragedies, a few short poems had appeared in blank verse; particularly one tending to reconcile the nation to Raleigh's wild attempt upon Guiana, and probably written by Raleigh himself. These petty performances cannot be supposed to have much influenced Milton, who more probably took his hint from Trisino's Italia 10 Liberata; and, finding blank verse easier than rhyme, was desirous of persuading himself that it is better.

Rhyme, he says, and says truly, is no necessary adjunct of true poetry. But perhaps, of poetry as a mental operation, metre or musick is no necessary adjunct: it is however by the musick of metre that poetry has been discrimated in all languages; and in languages melodiously constructed with a due proportion of long and short syllables, metre is sufficient. But one language cannot communicate its rules to another : where metre is scanty and imperfect, some help is necessary. 20 The musick of the English heroick line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together: this co-operation can be only obtained by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another, as a distinct system of sounds; and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme. The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer; and there are only a few skilful and happy readers of Milton, who enable their audience to perceive 30 where the lines end or begin. Blank verse, said an ingenious critick, seems to be verse only to the eye.

Poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English poetry will not often please; nor can rhyme ever be safely spared but where the subject is able to support itself. Blank verse makes some approach to that which is called the lapidary

style; has neither the easiness of prose, nor the melody of numbers, and therefore tires by long continuance. Of the Italian writers without rhyme, whom Milton alleges as precedents, not one is popular; what reason could urge in its defence, has been confuted by the ear.

But, whatever be the advantage of rhyme, I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer; for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is; yet, like other heroes, he is to be admired rather than imitated. He that 10 thinks himself capable of astonishing, may write blank verse; but those that hope only to please, must condescend to rhyme.

The highest praise of genius is original invention. Milton cannot be said to have contrived the structure of an epick poem, and therefore owes reverence to that vigour and amplitude of mind to which all generations must be indebted for the art of poetical narration, for the texture of the fable, the variation of incidents, the interposition of dialogue, and all the stratagems that surprise and enchain attention. But, 20 of all the borrowers from Homer, Milton is perhaps the least indebted. He was naturally a thinker for himself, confident of his own abilities, and disdainful of help or hindrance: he did not refuse admission to the thoughts or images of his predecessors, but he did not seek them. From his contemporaries he neither courted nor received support; there is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors might be gratified, or favour gained; no exchange of praise, nor solicitation of support. His great works were performed under discountenance, and in blindness, but difficulties van30 ished at his touch; he was born for whatever is arduous; and his work is not the greatest of heroick poems, only because it is not the first..

NOTES.

P. 1, 1. 4. Mr. Fenton's elegant Abridgement, "Elijah Fenton (1683-1730), who assisted Pope in translating Homer's Odyssey, 'undertook,' says Johnson in his life of Fenton, 'to revise the punctuation of Milton's poems, which, as the author neither wrote the original copy nor corrected the press, was supposed capable of amendment. To this edition he prefixed a short and elegant account of Milton's life, written at once with tenderness and integrity "" (Matthew Arnold, notes to The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets). The more important of the Lives to which Johnson refers were those by Anthony Wood, in Athena Oxonienses, and by Edward Philips, or Phillips, Milton's nephew.

11. 7, 8. descended... Oxfordshire, Masson, Life of Milton, i. 8, 9, says that "as to the alleged Miltons of Milton in Oxfordshire, the remote progenitors of the poet, research has been fruitless, and that "Philips's tradition of the ruin of the family by the Wars of the Roses is but the repetition of a legend common to many families."

1. 9. the times of York and Lancaster, the Wars of the Roses.

1. 11. the White Rose, the House of York. keeper... Shotover, the royal forest of Shotover was a tract of wooded land between the village of Holton, or Halton, and Oxford; but, according to Masson, Life, i. 10-12, none of the Miltons discovered as living in or about Holton "corresponds in all points to the description of the poet's grandfather ... who was under-ranger of Shotover Forest ....

1. 12. His grandfather John, according to Masson, the Christian name of Milton's grandfather was Richard, not John. "One of the family [of the poet's ancestors], Richard Milton, of Stanton St. John's, yeoman, was very resolute in his adherence to the Old Religion, and is mentioned twice in the Recusant Rolls for Oxfordshire as among those who were heavily fined

towards the end of Elizabeth's reign (1601) for obstinate nonattendance at their parish-churches. He was the poet's grandfather, one of his sons, John Milton, being the poet's father" (Milton's Poetical Works, i. p. 296).

1. 13. disinherited, on account, it is said, of his turning Protestant.

1. 16. scrivener, literally a copyist, notary; from O. F. escrivain, Lat. scriba, a scribe. "The business of a scrivener in Old London was an important, and sometimes a lucrative, one.. It consisted in the drawing up of wills, marriage settlements, and other deeds, the lending out of money for clients, and much else now done partly by attorneys and partly by law-stationers" (Masson, P. W. i. 297).

1. 18. profession, sc. of scrivener.

11. 19, 20. had ... more literature, was a man of more than ordinary acquaintance with literature. To have' in this sense was a common idiom in former days with such words as 'learning,' 'literature,' 'scholarship,' etc.

1. 21. one of... poems, that entitled "Ad Patrem," an hexameter poem of a hundred and twenty lines written when Milton was staying with his father at Horton in Buckinghamshire in 1632 or 1633.

...

1. 22. of the name family, according to one tradition her maiden name was Sarah Bradshaw; according to another, Sarah Caston; but recent researches have proved that her mother was wife of a Paul Jeffrey or Jeffreys, of an Essex family, and unless this lady was married more than once the maiden name of Milton's mother must have been Jeffrey or Jeffreys; "and it was probably," says Bradshaw, Milton's Poetical Works, Aldine ed., p. xviii., “her mother whom Aubrey discovered to be a Bradshaw."

1. 24. as the law taught him, here, as frequently in the Life, Johnson's Tory principles show themselves.

1. 25. the King's party, the royalist cause. For this adherence, and for having served as one of the King's Commissioners for sequestrating the estates of the Parliamentarians, he had, in 1646, to make submission to Parliament by taking the Covenant, and to sue out pardon by paying a fine on his property. After the Restoration he continued to practice as a barrister, and became a Bencher of the Inner Temple and Deputy Recorder of Ipswich. In 1686 he was sworn one of the Barons of the Exchequer, his character and the fact of his having become a Catholic recommending him to James. At the Revolution he retired into private life, and died at Ipswich in 1692, in his seventy-seventh year.