other forms of art, whether of single figures and statuesque moments for the sculptor, or of groups, incidents, and landscapes for the painter? In any or all of these respects what a poem it was! Then, through all, and imparting to all a sense of difference from anything known before, who could miss that tone of a certain personal something, that boom of self-conscious magnanimity, for which we have no name yet but the Miltonic? Even the occasional languours and lapses into the prosaic, as when some doctrine of Puritan theology had to be expounded in set terms, might give pleasure to many. What were they but the rests or sinkings of the eagle, that he might prove his strength of plume the next moment by again soaring to his highest in the sunbeams ?

Apart from every other recommendation of the poem, its scholarliness, its extraordinary fulness of erudition of all sorts, must have been admired immediately. What abundance and exactness of geographical, as well as of astronomical, reference and allusion; what lists of sonorous proper names rolled lovingly into the Iambic chaunt; what acquaintance with universal history; what compulsion of all the lusciousness of Ægean myth and Mediterranean legend into the service of the Hebrew theme! This man, who had the Bible by heart, whose verse, when he chose, could consist of nothing else than coagulations of texts from the Bible or concurrent Biblical gleams from the first of Genesis to the last of the Apocalypse, had also ransacked and enjoyed the classics. Though his flight was above the Aonian mount, yet Jove and Jason, Proteus and Apollo, Pan and the Nymphs, the Fauns and the Graces, all came into view as they were wanted, captives to his heavenly muse. The epic, while planned from the Bible, and while original in the entire conception and in every part, was also a mosaic of recollections from all that was best in Greek and Latin literature. Homer, Hesiod, the three Greek tragedians, Plato, Lucretius, Cicero, Virgil, Ovid, and the rest, had all yielded passages or flakes of their substance to be melted into the rich English enamel. But the learning displayed included more than the classics. The author's readings had evidently been wide and various in the

mediæval Latinists and later scholars of different countries, and especially close and familiar in Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, and others of the Italians. Of his acquaintance with all the preceding poetry of his own tongue there was no room for doubt. There were proofs, more particularly, of his intimacy with Spenser, Shakespeare, and those minor English poets of his own century who are best described as the Spenserians, and of whom Browne, Giles and Phineas Fletcher, and Drummond of Hawthornden, were the finest representatives. Had it been worth while, it could have been proved from Paradise Lost that Milton was no stranger to the writings of Cowley and Davenant1.

We are thus brought back to the fact that Paradise Lost made its appearance in Davenant's Laureateship and belongs by right of date to the English literature of the first years of the Restoration. On a comparison of the poem with all that was then recent or current what can have been the impression? The last things even nominally of the heroic or epic kind in

1 In connexion with this subject of the learning shown in Paradise Lost one might lose oneself again in the inquiry, prosecuted at such length by Todd and others, as to the amount of Milton's possible indebtedness to previous writers, Italian, Spanish, Latin, German, Dutch, and English, for this or that in his epic. Having elsewhere (Cambridge Milton, I. 36-40) given my impressions of the results of these miscellaneous bibliographical researches, and characterized them as, with one or two exceptions, "laborious nonsense," I will advert here only to that one form of the inquiry which seems to me the most curious biographically. Was Milton acquainted with the Anglo-Saxon Cadmon? The Cosmos of Cadmon has, of course, nothing in common with Milton's Cosmos, and is but a very limited and homely old Northumbrian world indeed; but there are some striking coincidences between notions and phrases in Satan's soliloquy in Hell in the Cadmonian Genesis and notions and phrases in the description of Satan's rousing himself and his fellows in the first book of Paradise Lost. Very probably the coincidences imply only strong conception of the same traditional situa

tions by two different minds; but it is just possible that there was more. When the Cadmonian fragments were first published, at Amsterdam, in 1655, by the Teutonic scholar Franciscus Junius, i.e. François Dujon, Milton, it is true, had been blind for three years, and there is some difficulty in understanding how he could then have found a reader fit to spell out to him the small quarto of 106 pages containing the fragments, printed as they were in the old Anglo-Saxon characters, running on painfully in prose fashion, without metrical break, and without comment or translation of any kind. The unique manuscript from which the volume was printed, however, had been in Archbishop Usher's library, and had been given by the Archbishop to Junius about 1651; and Junius, having been a resident in London continuously from 1620 to that year, must almost certainly have been a personal acquaintance of Milton's. Hence it is just possible that Milton had become acquainted with the precious Cædmonian manuscript before he was blind. If he heard of the discovery of such a thing, he was not likely to remain ignorant of its nature or contents.

English poetry were Cowley's Davideis, Davenant's Gondibert, and Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. None of these, of course, could stand within the sight of such an epic as this; nor, in going back through previous English poetry in search of the latest book, nominally of the epic order, worthy of being named with this in respect of general importance, could one bestow even a passing thought on Drayton, Daniel, or any of the rest of that century, or stop short of the Faery Queene. Then, the view enlarging itself, and the distinction of poetry into kinds ceasing to be relevant for the farther purpose of estimate, the recollection would be that the English nation had hitherto possessed but three poets of any kind that all the world could regard as really consummate. Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare were the trio of England's greatest, with none, later or intermediate, that could rank in their company. And now what had happened? A fourth poet had stepped out who must be associated for ever with those three predecessors. He had stepped out,-who could have expected it ?—in the person of a blind man domiciled in an obscure suburb of London, who, though there was a dim remembrance that he had professed poetry in his youth, had been known through his middle life as a Puritan pamphleteer, a divorcist, an iconoclast in Church and State, and who seven years ago, when Charles came to the throne, had been so specially infamous for his connexion with the Republic and the Regicide that he had barely escaped the gallows. Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, were thenceforth to be the quaternion of largest stars in the main portion of the firmament of English poetry. Nay, if there was to be a discrimination of degrees among the four, was it not Milton that was to be named inevitably whenever, on any plea of coequality of poetic genius visible through difference of modes, the supreme radiance of Shakespeare was to be challenged by the contrast of a peer or second? That is the understanding now, and it was formed with unusual rapidity, we shall find, in Milton's own generation. Meanwhile we are still in the year 1667. Paradise Lost has yet to find its readers, and there are lions in the path.

BOOK III.

AUGUST 1667-NOVEMBER 1674.

HISTORY:- ENGLISH POLITICS AND LITERATURE FROM 1667 TO 1674.

BIOGRAPHY: THE LAST SEVEN YEARS OF MILTON'S LIFE.