no 



formed by the poet in early youth, that it is found partly developed iu 

 his juvenile poems, and that even his prose is of the same colouring. 

 It was the offspring of an austere mind impregnated with profound 

 classical studies. 



The most prominent feature in Milton's diction is the attempt 

 to reproduce in English the grammatical structure of the classical 

 languages, and above all Latin.-= Milton wrote good Latin verses 

 himself, and, what cannot be said of many modern Latinists, a 

 very respectable Latin prose. He thought in Latin. The gravity and 

 stiffness of the Roman suited his character, he had nothing of the vi- 

 vacity or brilliancy or originality of the Greek. His writings exhibit a 

 most detennined struggle with the smooth simplicity of the J^uglish 

 idiom, which he endeavoured to raise to the dignity of Virgil's heroic 

 lines, or to the sublimity of Horace's Lyrics, or to the rhetoric pomp of 

 Cicero's long extended periods. How could he succeed in this unequal 

 undertaking ? Magnis excidit ausis. It was the same in his style as in 

 his subject : he attempted things impossible. In the oue he boldly 

 undertook to represent the infinite and immaterial by means of the 

 finite and of matter ; in the other he sought to imitate the complexity 

 of the Latin language, which abounds in inflexions, by means of the 

 plain and simple English tongue, which is deprived of this flexibility 

 by the almost total absence of grammatical terminations. 



The crystalization of thought in English and in the two classical 

 languages is essentially different. Ideas in English are arranged side by 

 side in co-ordinate sentences ; in Greek and Latin the sentences are 

 strung together by the principal of subordination. In Euglish the 

 number of principal sentences prevails over that of secondary ; in 

 Latin it is the reverse : English sentences are short and simple ; 

 Latin sentences are long and complicated : iu English the subjects. 

 Predicate and Object, with their respective qualiflcaiions and attri- 

 butes, stand in a regular order, which is seldom departed from. Latin 

 abounds in inversions of all kinds, no part of a seuLeiice has an exclu- 

 sive right to any particular place. In the unadorned diary, which 

 Caesar kept in his campaigns in Gaul, we find a great number of sen- 

 tences, which it is utterly impossible to render in English without 

 breaking them up into smaller ones.f The more elaborate style of 



* And it may be added iu Latin, of Horace, and in Horace of the Odes. 



+ Take, for example, IV. 30 — 

 " Omnibus rebus cognitis principes Britanniise, qui post proeliiim factum ad ea, quae jusserat 

 CiEsar, facienda conveuerant inter se coUocuti, quum equites et naves et frumentum Ro- 

 raanis deesseintelligerent, et paucitatem militum ex castiorum exiguitate cognoscerent, qua; 

 hoc erant etiam angustisra, quod sineimpL'dimeutisCcesar Icgiones transportaverat, optimum 



