his spirits, and died in his office at Whitehall in March 1669. He was buried, close to "O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream My great example, as it is my theme! Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull; Strong, without rage; without o'erflowing, full." These justly celebrated lines cannot, however, have aided in the original popularity of the poem, since they are not found in the early editions of it; it is believed that they occur for the first time in the sixth impression (1655) of Cooper's Hill. Sir John Denham collected his poems just before his death, in 1668. Title-page of Sir John Denham's It is in verse that we can study, far more easily than in prose, the crisis in English literature which we have now reached. That there is a distinction between the manner of Wilkins and of Tillotson, for instance, can be maintained and proved, yet to insist upon it might easily lead to exaggeration. But no one with an ear or an eye can fail to perceive the difference between Herrick and Denham; it cannot be too strongly affirmed; it is external as well as intrinsic, it is a distinction of form as well as essence. Denham, to put it otherwise, does not very essentially differ as a versifier from such a poet as Falconer, who lived one hundred and twenty years later. But between him and his exact contemporary Crashaw a great gulf is fixed; they stand on opposite platforms of form, of sentiment, of aim. In the years immediately preceding the Commonwealth, literature fell very low in England. But we must not forget that it was a composite age, an age of variegated experiments and highly coloured attempts. One of these deserves a certain. prominence, more for what it led to than what it was. So long as the drama reigned among us, prose fiction was not likely to Novels flourish, for the novel is a play, with all the scenery and the scene-shifting added, written for people who do not go to the theatre. But Sidney's example was still occasionally followed, and in the middle of the seventeenth Milton century the huge romances of the French began to be imported into England and imitated. The size of the originals may be gathered when it is said that one of the most popular, the Cléopâtre of Calprenède, is in twenty-three tomes, each containing as much as a volume of a Mudie novel. The English translations began to be very numerous after 1650, a version of the Grand Cyrus, in nearly 7000 pages, enjoying an immense success in 1653. It is difficult to speak of these pompous, chivalric romances without ridiculing them. A sketch of the plot of one reads like a burlesque. The original works of the English imitators of these colossal novels are of inferior merit to the original products of the Rambouillet school; the unfinished Parthenissa, composed in "handsome language" by Lord Orrery in 1654, is the best known of the former. The great vogue of these romances of chivalry was from 1650 to 1670, after which they were more or less merged in the "heroic" plays in rhymed verse which Dryden made popular. Their principal addition to literature was an attempt to analyse and reproduce the rapid emotional changes in the temperament of men and women, thus vaguely and blindly preparing the way for the modern realistic novel of psychology, and, more directly, for the works of Richardson. They formed the main secular reading of English women during the final decade preceding the Restoration, and in their lumbering diffuseness and slackness they exemplify, to an almost distressing degree, the main errors into which, notwithstanding the genius of one or two individuals, and the high ambition of many others, English literature had sunken. Between 1645 and 1660 the practice of literature laboured under extraordinary disabilities. First among these was the concentration of public interest on political and religious questions; secondly, there was the suspicion and enmity fostered between men, who would otherwise have been confrères, by these difficulties in religion and politics; thirdly, there was the languor consequent on the too prolonged cultivation of one field with the same methods. It seems paradoxical to say of an age that produced the early verse of Milton and the prose of Browne and Jeremy Taylor, that it was far gone in decadence; but these splendid and illuminating exceptions do not prevent the statement from being a correct one. England needed, not a few beacons over a waste of the waters of ineptitude, but a firm basis of dry land on which to build a practicable style for daily service; and to get this the waters had to be drained away, and the beautiful beacons extinguished, by the cataclysm of the Restoration. Before we consider, however, whither that revolution was to whirl the literature of this country, we must deal again with a stationary figure which belonged neither to the bankrupt past nor to the flushed and animated future. During twenty years Milton, but for an occasional sonnet, had said farewell to poetry. Not that the power had left him, not that the desire and intention of excelling in verse had passed away, but because other aspects of life interested him more, and because the exact form his great song should ultimately take had not impressed itself upon him. Milton permitted youth and middle age to pass, and remained obstinately silent. The Restoration caught him at his studies, and exposed him suddenly to acute personal danger. Towards merely political opponents Charles II. could afford to show himself lenient, and in politics there is no evidence that Milton had ever been influential. It is customary to think that Milton's official position laid him open to resentment, but in the day of its triumph the Monarchy could disdain an old paid servant of the Parliament, an emeritus-Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council. What it could less easily overlook was the author of Eikonoklastes, that rabid pamphlet in which not only the tenure of kings was savagely railed at, but the now sacred image of the martyred Charles I. was covered with ignominious ridicule. Milton's position was not that of Dryden, or of Waller, who had eulogised Cromwell, and could now bow lower still to praise the king. He stood openly confessed as one of the most violent of spiritual regicides. We might easily have lost our epic supremacy on the scaffold in August 1660, when the poet was placed so ominously in the custody of the Sergeantat-Arms. It seems probable that, to combine two legends, Davenant interceded with Morice on his behalf, and so helpless a rebel was contemptuously forgiven. We find him discharged in December 1660; and when the physical agitations of these first months had passed away, we conceive the blind man settling down in peace to his majestic task. His vein, his nephew, Edward Phillips, tells us, flowed only from the autumnal to the vernal equinox, and in the spring of 1661 the noblest single monument of English poetry doubtless began to take definite form. "Blind, old, and lonely," as in Shelley's vision of him, he was driven from prosperity and ease by the triumph of the liberticide, only that he might in that crisis become, what else he might have failed to be, "the sire of an immortal strain," "the third among the sons of light." There is reason to believe that Milton had already determined what should be the form and character of his Paradise Lost when Cromwell died. In 1663 he completed the poem. Two years later, at Elwood's suggestion, "What hast thou to say of Paradise found?" he began the second and the shorter work, which he finished about 1665. The choral tragedy of Samson Agonistes followed, perhaps in 1667, which was the year of the publication of Paradise Lost; Paradise Regained and Samson were printed together in 1671. Three years later Milton died, having, so far as is known, refrained from the exercise of verse during the last seven years of his life. It was, we may believe, practically between 1661 and 1667 that he built up the gorgeous triple structure on which his fame as that of the first among modern heroic poets is perennially sustained. The performances of Milton are surprising, yet his reticences are almost more amazing still. He sang, when the inspiration was on him, "with impetus and astro," and when the fit was off, could remain absolutely silent for years and years. The Milton of the Restoration has little affinity with the lyrical Milton whose work detained us in the early pages of this chapter. He appears before |