358 A Century of Science 



the views and mental habits of classic antiquity ; 

 he has soaked himself in the style of Lucan and 

 Seneca, until their mental peculiarities have be 

 come like a second nature to him, and are uncon 

 sciously betrayed alike in the general handling of 

 his story and in little turns of expression. Or take 

 Milton s &quot; Lycidas : &quot; no one but a man saturated 

 in every fibre with Theocritus and Virgil could 

 have written such a poem. An extremely foreign 

 and artificial literary form has been so completely 

 mastered and assimilated by Milton that he uses it 

 with as much ease as Theocritus himself, and has 

 produced a work that even the master of idyls had 

 scarcely equalled. After the terrific invective 

 against the clergy and the beautiful invocation to 

 the flowers, followed by the triumphant hallelujah 

 of Christian faith, observe the sudden reversion to 

 pagan sentiment where Lycidas is addressed as the 

 genius of the shore. Only profound scholarship 

 could have written this wonderful poem, could 

 have brought forth the Christian thought as if 

 spontaneously through the medium of the pagan 

 form. Now there is nothing of this sort in Shake 

 speare. He uses classical materials, or anything 

 else under the sun that suits his purpose. He 

 takes a chronicle from Holinshed, a biography from 

 North s translation of Plutarch, a legend from 



