115 



heroic hexameter is never fatiguing, though thousands follow upon 

 thousands. It is very unfortunate that this noble metre is inapplicable 

 to the English language. English is too devoid of infiexiouable short 

 syllables to be able to furnish a succession of dactyls ; it is too entirely 

 under the dominion of accent, as distinct from prosody, to boast of 

 many spondees ; for it is the tendency of every accent to make the two 

 adjacent syllables uuacceutuated, i. e. short. Milton therefore chose 

 the iambic blank verse, a metre which more than any other approaches 

 prose, and is therefore peculiarily fitted for dramatic poetry. To coun- 

 terbalance this disadvantage it was necessary to guard against a trivial 

 flow of the verse by judicious distribution of the cfesuras, and on the 

 other hand to fill the line with a diction as solemn and noble as 

 could be commanded. Milton accordingly availed himself of all the 

 artifices lawful in such a case ; his chief object was to avoid triviality 

 of expression, and in doing this he followed and cultivated a natural 

 taste, of which he has given proof in all his works, prose and poetry, 

 from his earliest compositions upwards. His natural austerity of 

 thought led him to adopt that style of which Seneca says, " Riget 

 oratio ; nihil in eaplacidum, nihil lene." It is allowed even by Addison 

 " that it is often too much laboured, and sometimes obscured by old words, 

 transj)ositions, and foreign idioms ;" he pleads as an excuse, that Milton's 

 sentiments and ideas were so wonderfully sublime, that it would have 

 been impossible for him to have represented them in their full strength 

 and beauty without having recourse to these foreign assistances. " Our 

 language," he continues, "sunk under him, and was unequal to that 

 greatness of soul which furnished him with such glorious conceptions." 



Johnson (p. 179) is rather hard upon Milton in this respect: " The 

 truth is," he says, " that both in prose and in verse, Milton had formed 

 his style by a perverse and pedantic principle ; he was desirous to use 

 English words with a foreign idiom ;" (p. 180.) " Of him may be said, 

 what Johnson says of Spenser, that he wrote no language, but has 

 formed 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, that like other lovers we find grace in its 

 deformity." 



This judgment on Milton's style, though severe, is in the main 

 correct and just. I shall in the sequel endeavour to prove this in detail, 

 confining myself to the " Paradise Lost," not because the peculiarity of 

 style, of which I am about to speak, is to be met with in this poem alone, 

 but because I must set limits to this enquiry, which has already extended 

 too far. It might be proved, that the peculiarly Miltonian style was 



