84 



THE POPULAR EDUCATOR. 



force extends to fertilem. Fertilem here is not a mere epithet, 

 as you may learn by so rendering it in the passive voice the 

 fertile Mesopotamia is produced by the Euphrates. This is not 

 the sense ; what is meant is that the Euphrates causes Meso- 

 potamia to be fertile ; and as in this English sentence the verb 

 causes has two objects, namely, Mesopotamia and to be, so the 

 Latin sentence has two objects, namely, Mesopotamiam and 

 fertilem. The phrase and the construction are different from 

 what appears in " laudo discipulum diligentem," where dili- 

 gentem is an epithet simply qualifying discipulum. If, however, 

 we write " efficio discipulum diligentem," diligentem becomes a 

 second accusative. 



Verbs which signify to teach, to learn, to aslc, as doceo, disco, 

 rogo, take two accusatives, one of the person, the other of the 

 thing. In the passive voice these verbs have one accusative ; 

 though this construction is exceptional, and seldom used but 

 by the poets : 



Active. Doceo TE ARTEM, I teach ihee an art. 

 Passive. Ars te docetur, an art is taught thee. 

 Passive. Tu doceris ARTEM, thou art taught an art. 



Celo, I conceal, hide from, has the same construction. 



The accusative is used after verbs of motion to denote the 

 place whither a person proceeds. The construction may be 

 without a preposition, or with a preposition ; first, without a 

 preposition, when the place or object is the name of a city or 

 a small island, or when the noun is domus or rus ; thus, eo 

 Athenas, I go to Athens ; eo domum, I go home ; eo rus, I go 

 into the country; eo Delum, I go to (the island) Delos. In 

 all other cases a preposition is required to denote the place 

 whither you go such as ad, in, versus, adversus, contra, ob, 

 sub, subter, circum and circa, extra, intra, ultra, trans. 



A double accusative is found also with verbs compounded 

 with the prepositions trans and circum : 



Capias flumen transduxit Coesar, Caesar led his forces over the river. 



Pompeius eos crania sua prsesidia circumduxit, Pompey led all his 

 forces round them. 



From the use of an accusative to signify direction towards 

 an object comes the use of an accusative to signify breadth, or 

 the distance through which you pass in making your way to an 

 object. This is called the accusative of breadth; it answers to 

 the question how far ? and may be equally used of length or 

 distance ; as 



Milites aggerem latum pedes trecentos exstruxerunt. 



The soldiers raised a mound three hundred feet broad. 



As length of place, so length of time is expressed by the 

 accusative ; as 



Alexander Magnus tredScim annost regnavit. 

 Alexander th Great reigned thirteen years. 



Tha accusative case is also used in exclamations and dired 

 addresses ; as 



Me ccecum, qui hffic ante non viderim ! 



Blind that I am not to have seen these things before ! 



The accusative, perhaps, is produced by the effect of words 

 now no longer in use, and the construction may be lookec 

 upon as an ellipsis. Me miscrum ! may originally have been 

 me miserum dico ! It is more probable that the accusative 

 is used as being the natural objective case. 



The vocative also ia employed in exclamation j as 

 miser, quod non sentis, quam miser sis/ 

 wretched man, in that thou fc)i west not how wretched thou art I 



The nominative, too, may bu employed when it suffices to 

 mention an object in order to refer to it ; as 

 O fortunata luors, quse pro patria est reddita. 

 fortunate death which is undergone for one's native land. 



After en and ecce (= ence) the nominative generally stands : 

 Ecce tuss littera/ j En dextra fldesque/ 



More seldom the accusative occurs with en and ecce. " i 

 quatuor aras ! ecce duas tibi, Daphne ! " are found in Virgil 

 and "ecce me! eccillum ! eccum ! eccos!" are common in th 

 comic poets. 



The dative may accompany an exclamation when the object i 

 a personal one to whose advantage or disadvantage anythin 

 happens; as 



VHB tibi t hei misero mifci/ Woe to thee I alas, welched one ! 



JESSONS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE. XVII. 



MILTON. 



'HE one supremely great name in the literature of the period 

 ow under review, the period of the Civil War and the Common- 

 ealth, is that of Milton. Milton is as completely the type 

 nd representative of the literature of his own age as Shakespeare 

 was in the preceding generation. That intense earnestness of 

 iurpose, that thoroughness both in thought and in learning, 

 nd that profoundly religious spirit which characterised the 

 greatest writers of that day ; and, not less, the delicacy and re- 

 .nement of taste and feeling, and the keen sense of harmony, 

 which were the special merits of its lesser poets : all these 

 Dualities Milton possessed above all other men ; while, in addi- 

 ion to all this, he was gifted with an intellectual greatness and 



commanding genius, which place him among the greatest 

 poets of all time. 



John Milton was born in the year 1608. He was sprung of 

 ,n old family ; but his father, having adopted the tenets of the 

 i'uritan party, had become separated from his family, and had 

 maintained himself and his family, and earned a competent 

 ortune, by pursuing the business of a scrivener, a term which, 

 n his day, denoted one employed in the responsible office of 

 negotiating investments for money. Though his great son fol- 

 owed the Puritan views of his father, the family were not 

 unanimously upon this side in the contests of the day. The 

 joet's younger brother, Christopher Milton, was a zealous 

 loyalist, became eminent as a lawyer, and was for a short time 

 one of the judges of the Court of Common Pleas under James II. 

 The future poet was born in London, but his childhood and 

 early youth were passed for the most part at his father's 

 country-house at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. His father was 

 limself a man of education and taste, and an accomplished 

 musician ; a Puritan in religion, and with, no doubt, those poli- 

 tical sympathies which distinguished the Puritans as a party 

 from their religious opponents. From him we may presume 

 that Milton received his earliest education. He was then at 

 St. Paul's School, in London; and from thence he passed to 

 Christ's College, Cambridge. Of the details of Milton's life at 

 the university we know little. But though the talcs upon 

 which his earlier biographers delighted to dwell of humiliating 

 punishments undergone, and expulsion incurred by him at the 

 hands of the authorities of his college rest upon no satisfactory 

 evidence, and may probably be rejected, there can be little 

 doubt that he found the tone of the place uncongenial ; and one 

 passage in particular, in one of his Latin poems, shows that he 

 looked back upon his university with but little affection. 

 Although, however, Milton was all his life a student, and with 

 him, more than with most men, it would be inaccurate to speak 

 of any one period as distinctively the period of his education, 

 ho must have made abundant use of the years he passed at 

 Cambridge, and must even at that time have acquired an extent 

 of learning rare in a rarely learned age. For Milton was one of 

 that small number of men of the highest order of genius, whose 

 powers have shown themselves at an extremely early age. 

 Almost from boyhood he was a great poet, as well as a great 

 scholar ; and almost from boyhood he seems to have been fully 

 conscious of his own extraordinary powers. After leaving Cam- 

 bridge, Milton spent some years at his father's house. The 

 cause of his passing this period of seeming inaction is not far 

 to seek. Milton had originally been designed for, and himself 

 contemplated, entering upon holy orders ; but he was deterred 

 from carrying out this intention by a repugnance for the intel- 

 lectual restraints which such a course would have imposed upon 

 him. And we can easily imagine that, to a mind as keenly 

 alive as Milton's to the responsibilities of life, the choice of 

 a new course was not the work of a day. Upon some such 

 ground he himself afterwards explained the seeming loss of 

 these years. They were not years, however, of idleness, but of 

 profound study. In 1638 Milton went abroad, and spent more 

 than a year in the enjoyment of the society, and in cultivating 

 the friendship, of the most eminent men of letters of the Con- 

 tinent, and especially of Italy. 



This visit to the Continent forms the close of the first period 

 of Milton's literary history. He was by this time known as a 

 man of extraordinary learning. Of the ancient languages and 

 literature he was a consummate master ; nor was he less familiar 

 with the living tongues. In Italy, the most cultured nation of 



