1076 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
Discontent came in with the Stuarts, and the volcanie 
upheavals of civil war choked the stream of genius, which had 
flowed so freely in the sixteenth century, and overflowed into the 
seventeenth century. With Cromwell there was a short period of 
peace and prosperity, during which England made herself respected 
abroad ; and from the ranks of the Puritans came two of 
England’s greatest worthies, Milton and Bunyan ; the former was 
the great exponent of English epic poetry; while the latter, 
being born out of due season, wrote his masterpiece of English 
religious prose in the licentious times of a Stuart tyrant, within 
the walls of a prison. Milton was educated at Cambridge, 
where he received the highest education that England could 
afford. This he perfected by travel ; and, like Chaucer and Surrey, 
found in Italian poetry that delight and attraction which led 
him, English-like, to try to excel it in his native tongue. 
It had always been his ambition to accomplish some great 
and lasting work. In his treatise on Church Government 
he says: “By labour and intense study, which I take to be 
my portion in this life, joimed with the strong propensity of 
nature, | hope to leave something so written to aftertimes as 
they should not willingly let it die.” In the days of his youth 
and strength, Milton impresses us more as the political and 
religious controversialist than as the poet of his age ; but when 
tried and purified by a long succession of misfortunes, including 
blindness, political persecution, and filial neglect, he produced his 
masterpiece ‘‘ Paradise Lost.” In the folio edition of Paradise 
Lost, published by subscription in 1680, under Milton’s portrait 
appeared the the famous lines of Dryden :— 
Three poets, in three distant ages born, 
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn. 
The first in loftiness of thought surpassed ; 
The next in majesty ; in both the last, 
The force of Nature could no further go— 
To make a third she joined the former two. 
It is a fact worth recording that Milton had access to a copy 
of Caedmon’s Poems, treating on the Fall of the Rebel Angels, 
and that many similar passages may be recognised in the two 
works. 
Of this epoch we may say with Macaulay: “‘ Though there were 
many clever men in England in the latter half of the seventeenth 
century, there were only two minds which possessed the imagi- 
native faculty in a very eminent degree. One of these minds 
produced ‘ Paradise Lost,’ the other the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’” 
Like John Bright, in our own times, Bunyan used the simplest 
words to express the loftiest thoughts ; his meaning was as plain 
to the rustic as to the student, all long-syllabled technical terms 
