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adopt classical idiom was very much in excess to the capability of the 

 English language to receive them. 



This opinion is corroborated by the thousands of lexicological clas- 

 sicism spread over the works of Milton, Many of these, it is true, have 

 ceased to be strange. They have been assimilated in course of time 

 to the rest of the English vocabulary ; for this process is far easier in 

 isolated words than in grammatical constructions. Yet a great number 

 of expressions are still so far un-English that only a classical scholar 

 is able to understand them. For the sake of illustration I will select a 

 few. 



No passage is better known than the beginning of book III., which 

 contains the beautiful address to light ; yet I am almost bold enough to 

 • say, that the expression in v. 7, " hearest thou," is not understood by 

 one in a hundred of the general readers. No wonder ; as the verb 

 hear is used in the sense of the Latin audio, which means sometimes 

 to be called. The expression — 



" Or hearest thou rather pure ethereal stream" — 

 is in fact an imitation of Horace's " Matutine Pater, seu lane libentius 

 audis." 



Who but a classical scholar can understand— 



V. 19. " War he perceived, war in proeinct." 

 What reader would not think of quarrels in the following passage : — 

 VIII. 53. " And solve high dispute 

 With conjugal caresses." 

 Solicit is the Latin sollicitare in 



VIII. 107. " Solicit not thy thoughts with matters hid." 

 Memory is the Latin memoria ; i.e. time remembered — 

 VII. 637. " And what before thy memory was done." 

 Compare farther — 

 X. 1101. "With tears 



Watering tlie ground, and with their sighs the aii- 

 Frequenting." 

 VTI. 323. "And bush with frizzled hair (coma) implicit (implicita.") 



A longer enumeration of such isolated verbal peculiarities would be 

 tedious. To use our poet's own Latinised expression — 

 I. .507. " The rest were long to tell." 

 They stand in the same relation to his diction, in which the Greek 

 mythology stands to bis biblical fable ; they are those dark spots in the 

 moon's bright visage, " vapours, not yet into her substance turned ;" 

 and as, after the lapse of almost 200 years, they are still unassimilated, 

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