follow Milton's example. Dryden, at the very time he urged abandoning the couplet on the stage, apparently thought that Paradise Lost would be much better 'tagged.'1 I have examined hundreds of blank-verse plays of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and have yet to find one that is at all Miltonic; but, as will be shown later, there are comparatively few unrimed poems of these centuries that are not influenced by Paradise Lost. The dramatic blank verse was, so far as it was imitative at all, Shakespearean or Jonsonian,2 the non-dramatic was usually Miltonic. Almost the only poem that is likely to have derived its style and prosody from the drama is Blair's Grave, and this was also influenced by Paradise Lost. The most striking instances of the absolute separation between the two kinds of verse are to be found in the works of such men as Thomson, Glover, Mason, and Mallet, who wrote both kinds. By way of illustration, here is a typical passage from Glover's drama Boadicia (1753) and one from his epic Leonidas (1737):

Go, and report this answer to Suetonius.

Too long have parents sighs, the cries of orphans,
And tears of widows, signaliz'd your sway,
Since your ambitious Julius first advanc'd
His murd'rous standard on our peaceful shores.
At length unfetter'd from his patient sloth,
The British genius lifts his pond'rous hands
To hurl with ruin his collected wrath
For all the wrongs, a century hath borne,
In one black period on the Roman race.1

He said. His seeming virtue all deceiv'd.
The camp not long had Epialtes join'd,
By race a Malian. Eloquent his tongue,
But false his heart, and abject. He was skill'd
To grace perfidious counsels, and to cloath
In swelling phrase the baseness of his soul,
Foul nurse of treasons. To the tents of Greece,
Himself a Greek, a faithless spy he came.
Soon to the friends of Xerxes he repair'd,
The Theban chiefs, and nightly consult held."

1 1 Aside from turning parts of it into rime in his State of Innocence and Fall of Man, he says in the "Essay on Satire" prefixed to his translations from Juvenal (Works, ed. Scott-Saintsbury, xiii. 20), “Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse . ... his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent."

for

The use of Miltonic blank verse in translations of Greek tragedies and other

classic dramas is a not unnatural exception (see pp. 346-51 below).

See pp. 383-5 below.

'bentoadicia, act i.

'L3 Sonidas, ii. 224–33

If we realize that to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets blank verse in a drama was an entirely different thing from blank verse in a poem, and that to them there was but one unrimed poem, Paradise Lost, we shall better understand the powerful influence which this work exerted. Blank verse meant verse that was Miltonic, and "Miltonic verse" usually meant little more than blank verse. Two poems published in the London Magazine in 1738, for example, are said to be "attempted in Miltonic verse," 1 which must mean blank verse, for the pieces have no more suggestion of Paradise Lost than has Addison's translation, Milton's Style Imitated, where the imitation is limited to the absence of rime. In the following lines by Edmund Smith "Miltonian verse" means simply blank

verse:

Oh! might I paint him in Miltonian verse.

But with the meaner Tribe I'm forc'd to chime,
And wanting Strength to rise, descend to Rhyme.3

If a writer grew tired of the couplet or desired a freer measure, there was, accordingly, but one thing for him to do, - follow Paradise Lost. And it is not to be wondered at that, in following his model, he usually copied many characteristics which were merely the personal peculiarities of Milton and hence had no necessary connection with blank verse. He did not distinguish between the two things. As a result, blank-verse poems usually stood by themselves, with their style, diction, and prosody little affected by those of either the drama or the couplet. This curious state of affairs led the same man to write Popean couplets on one day and Miltonic blank verse containing no suggestion of Pope on the next. To us such a complete separation is hard to understand. Why should not a poet merely have taken a hint from Milton and written his own blank verse? Why not have combined the diction of Pope with the prosody of Milton? It seems perfectly easy. But we forget that the truisms of to-day are the discoveries of yesterday; we forget how slowly and painfully the world came to ideas which we imbibed naturally in childhood; we forget Columbus and the egg.

Yet even when a man did think of writing poems in blank verse of

1 vii. 44: Hymn to the Morning and Hymn to Night. 2 See pp. 104-5 below. 3 Poem on the Death of John Philips (1708?), 2. So John Nichols (Illustrations, 1817, i. 664) speaks of one who "has left the Miltonic measure, and falls with graceful ease into rhyme." See also p. 47 above.

• Compare, for example, Fenton's riming of the first, fourth, nineteenth, and twentieth books of Pope's Homer, with his translation of the eleventh book of the Odyssey "in Milton's style"; or Prior's rimed paraphrase of the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians with his unrimed version of the two hymns of Callimachus.

1

his own he was unable to do it well. There were not many who tried it in Dryden's or Pope's day,1 and those who did produced unrimed couplets like these:

Unpolish'd Verses pass with many Men,
And Rome is too Indulgent in that Point;
But then, to write at a loose rambling rate,
In hope the World will wink at all our faults,
Is such a rash, ill-grounded confidence,
As men may pardon, but will never praise.
Consider well the Greek Originals,

Read them by day, and think of them by night.

If Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, author of the famous Essay on Translated Verse, could do no better than this, is it any wonder that the ordinary, struggling poet made no attempt to strike out for himself, but slavishly followed in Milton's tracks?

To break away from Paradise Lost and yet not at the same time fall to the dead level of Roscommon's translation, that is, to write what we may think of as everyday blank verse, was a task so difficult that English writers were one hundred and fifty years in accomplishing it. One thing which held them back was their fear of being prosaic.3 If even at this late day we are not entirely free from the impression that poetry and rime are almost synonymous, how much more strongly must this feeling have been with those who were bred under the dominance of the heroic couplet. Most blank verse seemed hardly more like poetry to hundreds of the contemporaries of Dryden, Pope, and even Johnson than do the measures of Walt Whitman or Amy Lowell to many readers of to-day. Yet Milton's unrimed lines did impress nearly everybody as poetry. They were made so, it was commonly supposed, by certain original characteristics or devices which lifted them above prose and separated them sharply from stanzaic or couplet verse. Without the stiffening of these characteristics, it was thought, blank verse could not stand. Many versifiers therefore copied them blindly, others scattered them through their prosaic lines as a cook may mix raisins and sugar into bread dough to make it seem like cake, and still others adopted them almost unconsciously.

1 Such pieces of non-Miltonic blank verse published between 1667 and 1750 as I have come upon are listed in Appendix B, below.

* Roscommon's translation, Horace's Art of Poetry (1680), p. 18. Most of Milton's predecessors in non-dramatic blank verse did no better; nor did Walter Pope (see below, p. 90, n. 3), or the "Gentleman of Oxford," whose original blank-verse "argument" is even worse than his unrimed New Version of P. L. (cf. p. 35 above).

See pp. 67-8 above.

To trace the influence of Paradise Lost, therefore, we have only to discover these outstanding characteristics which were thought to distinguish it alike from other poetry and from prose, and to search for them in later poetry. They seem to me to fall into nine main classes: -1

1. DIGNITY, RESERVE, and STATELINESS. Paradise Lost is as far removed from conversational familiarity in style or language as any poem could well be:

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse.

2. The ORGAN TONE, the sonorous orotund which is always associated with Milton's name: 2

Against the throne and monarchy of God.
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms.
O Prince, O Chief of many throned powers,
That led the embattled Seraphim to war.

O thou that, with surpassing glory crown'd,
Look'st from thy sole dominion like the god
Of this new World.

3. INVERSION OF THE NATURAL ORDER OF WORDS AND PHRASES, one of Milton's many Latinisms:

Them thus employ'd beheld

With pity Heaven's high King.

Ten paces huge

He back recoil'd.

Me, of these

Nor skill'd nor studious, higher argument

Remains.

1 There is a somewhat similar list in Francis Peck's New Memoirs of Milton (1740, pp. 105-32), a curious hodge-podge that contains a good deal of valuable information. A brief examination of Milton's style will be found in the Spectator, no. 285.

2 Cf. Bowles's

Great Milton's solemn harmonies . . .
Their long-commingling diapason roll,
In varied sweetness

(Monody on Warton, 121-5); Tennyson's "God-gifted organ-voice of England” (Milton, 3); and Wordsworth's "Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea" (sonnet on Milton, 10).

3 i. 42, 49, 128–9; iv. 32-4.

4 V. 219-20; vi. 193-4; ix. 41-3.

a. An inversion that is particularly Miltonic is the placing of a word between two others which depend upon it or upon which it depends, as a noun between two adjectives, a noun between two verbs, a verb between two nouns, etc. For example, " temperate vapours bland," "heavenly form Angelic," "unvoyageable gulf obscure," "gather'd aught of evil, or conceal'd";

Firm peace recover'd soon, and wonted calm.

Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before.1

4. The OMISSION OF WORDS NOT NECESSARY TO THE SENSE, one feature of the condensation that marks Milton's style:

Though all our glory extinct, and happy state

Here swallow'd up in endless misery.

And where their weakness, how attempted best,
By force or subtlety.

Extended wide

In circuit, undetermined square or round.2,

5. PARENTHESIS AND APPOSITION. These two devices, similar in character, since apposition is a kind of parenthesis, — were also probably due in a considerable degree to Milton's fondness for condensed expression. Familiar examples are:

Of Abbana and Pharphar, lucid streams.

Ahaz, his sottish conqueror, whom he drew.

Their song was partial, but the harmony
(What could it less when Spirits immortal sing?)
Suspended Hell, and took with ravishment

The thronging audience. In discourse more sweet
(For eloquence the soul, song charms the sense)
Others apart sat on a hill retired.

Thus saying, from her side the fatal key,
Sad instrument of all our woe, she took.

Where eldest Night

And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold.

Sable-vested Night, eldest of things,

The consort of his reign.

The neighbouring moon

(So call that opposite fair star).

1 v. 5; ix. 457–8; x. 366; v. 207, 210; ii. 703.

1i. 141-2; ii. 357-8, 1047-8

i. 469, 472; ii. 552-7, 871-2, 894-5, 962–3; iii. 726-7. Cf. also ii. 769, 790-91.

921-2; iii. 372-84; iv. 321-4.