scarcely in these days be sufficient to keep these epics alive, were it not for the subsidiary enchantments of the very ornament which to grave minds may at first have seemed out of place. Dryden, with his admirable perspicuity, early perceived that it was precisely where the language of the Authorised Version trammelled him too much that Milton failed, inserting

PARADISE

REGAIND.

A

POEM.

In IV BOOKS.

To which is added

SAMSON AGONISTES.

The Author

JOHN MILTON.

LONDON,

Printed by J. M. for John Starkey at the
Mitre in Fleetftreet, near Temple-Bar.
MDCLXXI

Title-page of Milton's "Paradise Regained,"

First Edition, 1671

what Dryden calls "a track of Scripture" into the text. It is where he escapes from Scriptural tradition that the grandiose or voluptuous images throng his fancy, and the melody passes from stop to stop, from the reed-tone of the bowers of Paradise to the open diapason of the council of the rebel angels. As he grew older the taste of Milton grew more austere. The change in the character of his ornament is deeply marked when we ascend from the alpine meadows of Paradise Lost to the peaks of Paradise Regained, where the imaginative air is so highly rarefied that many readers find it difficult to breathe. Internal evidence may lead us to suppose Samson Agonistes to be an even later manifestation of a genius that was rapidly rising into an atmosphere too thin for human enjoyment. Milton had de

clared, in a sublime utterance of his early life, that the highest poetry was not "to be obtained by the invocation of Dame Memory and her siren. daughters," but by the direct purification of divine fire placed on the lips. of the elect by the hallowed fingers of the seraphim. That inspiration, he did not question, ultimately came to him, and in its light he wrote. But we do him no dishonour after these years if we confess that he owed more of his charm than he acknowledged to the aid of those siren daughters. He was blind, and could not refresh the sources of memory, and by-and-by

the sirens, like his own earthly daughters, forsook him, leaving him in the dry and scarce tolerable isolation of his own integral dignity. Without his ineffable charm the Milton of these later poems would scarcely be readable, and that charm consists largely in two elements-his exquisite use of pagan or secular imagery, and the unequalled variety and harmony of his versification.

The blank verse of the epics has been at once the model and the despair of all who have attempted that easiest and hardest of measures since the end of the seventeenth century. On his manipulation of this form Milton founds his claim to be acknowledged the greatest artist or artificer in verse that the English race has produced. The typical

blank iambic line has five full and uniform stresses, such as we find in correct but timid versifiers throughout our literature. All brilliant writers from Shakespeare downwards have shown their mastery of the form by the harmonious variation of the number and value of these stresses; but Milton goes much further in this respect than any other poet, and, without ever losing his hold upon the norm, plays with it as a great pianist plays with an air. His variations of stress, his inversions of rhythm, what have been called his "dactylic" and "trochaic" effects, add immeasurably to the freshness and beauty of the poem. When we read Paradise Lost aloud, we are surprised at the absence of that monotony which mars our pleasure in reading most other works of a like length and sedateness. No one with an ear can ever have found Milton dull, and the prime cause of this perennial freshness is the amazing art with which the blank verse is varied. It leaps like water from a spring, always in the same direction and volume, yet never for two consecutive moments in exactly the same form.

John Milton

MILTON

FROM "PARADISE LOST."

Overhead up grew

Insuperable height of loftiest shade,

Cedar and pine, and fir, and branching palm,
A sylvan scene; and, as the ranks ascend
Shade above shade, a woody theatre

Of stateliest view. Yet higher than their tops
The verdurous wall of Paradise up-sprung:
Which to our general sire gave prospect large
Into his nether empire neighbouring round;
And higher than that wall a circling row
Of goodliest trees, loaden with fairest fruit,
Blossoms and fruits at once, of golden hue,
Appear'd, with gay enamell'd colours mix'd :

On which the sun more glad impress'd his beams,

Than in fair evening cloud, or humid bow,

When God hath shower'd the earth; so lovely seem'd

That landskip and of pure now purer air

Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires

Vernal delight and joy, able to drive

All sadness but despair: now gentle gales
Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense
Native perfumes, and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils. As when to them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabean odours from the spicy shore

Of Araby the Blest; with such delay

Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league

Cheer'd with the grateful smell, old Ocean smiles.

So entertain'd those odorous sweets the fiend.

FROM "PARADISE REGAINED."

Look once more, ere we leave this specular mount,
Westward, much nearer by south-west, behold,
Where on the Ægean shore a city stands,

Built nobly, pure the air, and light the soil,

Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts

And eloquence, native to famous wits

Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,

City or suburban, studious walks and shades.

See there the olive grove of Academe,

Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird

Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long ;

There, flowery hill, Hymettus, with the sound

Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites

To studious inusing; there Ilissus rolls

His whispering stream: within the walls then view
The schools of ancient sages; his, who bred

85

Great Alexander to subdue the world,

Lyceum there, and painted Stoa next :

There shalt Thou hear and learn the secret power

Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit

By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,
Æolian charms, and Dorian lyric odes,

And his who gave them breath, but higher sung,
Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer call'd,
Whose poem Phoebus challenged for his own :
Thence what the lofty grave tragedians taught
In chorus or iambic, teachers best

Of moral prudence, with delight received
In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
Of fate, and chance, and change in human life,
High actions, and high passions best describing.

Towards the end of the period we have been considering, prose was cultivated in England by a great many persons who have no place at all, or but a secondary place, in the history of the development of style. They must not, however, be entirely overlooked; and for practical purposes they may be divided into three classes. There were, firstly, those who had something to say about purely scientific speculation, and who followed WILKINS into the paths of what was called experimental philosophy. Secondly, there were those who gave in their adherence to the Cambridge school of divines, and who, in opposition to Hobbes, asserted the liberty of the will, encouraging a movement towards the spiritual and mystic side of things. Of these the leaders were HENRY MORE, and, in his True Intellectual System of the Universe, 1678, RALPH CUDWORTH (1617-1688). Thirdly, there were the body of miscellaneous writers, autobiographers, antiquaries, diarists and the like, who with infinite patience and self-satisfaction built up the secret history of the age or helped to preserve its muniments. Of these minor writers of the Commonwealth, it has to be confessed that their prose presents no features of great interest, apart from the facts or the ideas with which it deals. Each of them has a tendency to wordiness; all become tedious at last from their untiring sinuosity. They are didactic and scholastic in their attitude to literature; their ambition makes them often cumbrous, and they are delightful only when some gleam of human experience seduces them into forgetfulness of it. Everything points to the necessity of relieving English style by elements of lucidity, brevity and grace-those qualities, in fact, which the next chapter introduces to our notice in writers like Tillotson, Halifax and Temple.

John Wilkins (1614-1672) was the son of an Oxford goldsmith, and was educated at Daventry under the charge of his grandfather, John Dod, "the famous Decalogist," and at a private school in Oxford. He passed rapidly and with credit

WILKINS: ASHMOLE

87

through the university, entered into Holy Orders, and became chaplain to the Palatine of the Rhine. In 1638 he published the most remarkable of his speculative works, The Discovery of a

New World, followed in 1640 by The Earth may be a Planet. His Mercury in 1641, and Mathematical Magic, 1648, complete the list of Wilkins's more important publications. He had a splendid inter-university career, being appointed Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, in 1648, and Master of Trinity, Cambridge, in 1659. But as he was a parliamentarian, he was ejected at the Restoration. After a period of very low fortunes, he was made Dean of Ripon in 1664, and Bishop of Chester in 1668. He died in London on the 19th of November 1672. The whole life of Wilkins was devoted to two aims, the extension of scientific investigation, or, as it was then called, "philosophical" experiment, and the reconciliation of the Dissenters with the Church of England. It is in him that we first observe certain intellectual foibles of the approaching eighteenth century, and in particular its dislike of enthusiasm.

John Wilkins

Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) was the greatest antiquary and archeologist of the second half of the seventeenth century. He was born at Lichfield on the 23rd of May 1617, and having a talent for music was trained to be a chorister in that cathedral. He afterwards came up to London, and adopted the law as a profession. After the Civil War, in which he took an active part on the King's side, Ashmole retired to Englefield in Berkshire, and "went a-simpling," that is to say, gave himself up to the study of botany. In 1649 he settled in London, and began his famous collection of the works of the English Chemists, issued in 1652. At the Restoration Ashmole was made Windsor Herald, and in 1661 Secretary of Surinam, which colony he administered from London. He became very wealthy and loaded with honours. In 1679 a fire destroyed a great portion of his vast collection of antiquities and curiosities; the remainder he presented in 1683 to the University of Oxford, which had erected a stately building to receive them and Ashmole's books and MSS. He died on the 18th of May 1692, and was buried in South Lambeth Church, under a monument of black marble, which, after describing his demise, added "but while the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford stands, he shall never die." His Diary, which was printed in 1717, is a garrulous and pleasing fragment of auto