stamped itself on his retentive memory, e.g. in the curious Latinism : Meanwhile inhabit lax, ye Powers of Heaven (P.L. vii. 162).1 To sum up what has been said: in this stupendous monument of genius all the poetical materials of twelve centuries seem wrought into shape, as by the hand of a sculptor. Far away in the dawn of the Christian religion we see the subject shaping itself into rude outline in the Latin of Avitus, or assimilating elements of sublime horror from the mythology of the northern barbarians. In course of time the simple organism is amplified with the glosses and explanations of the ancient Fathers: glimpses appear of the controversy between Arius and Athanasius, and of the great disputes on the question of free will and necessity, of original sin and grace and redemption, of divine foreknowledge and justice; all blended with what has been thought and said upon such matters by the acuteness of school divines from the days of Augustine down to those of Luther and Calvin. Nor is there wanting the supernatural machinery required to present the subject in an epic form, for already there is in existence the neo-Platonic revelation of the angelic hierarchy, supposed to be derived from Dionysius the Areopagite, for which a local habitation has been found in the empyrean heaven, with the nine revolving planetary spheres imagined by the Ptolemaic system of astronomy. When these materials come into the hands of Milton, such doubts as have arisen respecting the soundness of the physical theory, in view of the reasoning of Copernicus and Galileo, are not yet sufficiently widespread to disturb the symmetrical view of the universe formed by the general mind, which also accepts with believing equanimity the rich mythology of "vulgar errors" bequeathed to it by the Natural History of the elder Pliny. Yet this traditional science is so arranged in the scheme of the poem as to leave the judicious reader at liberty to conceive of Nature according to the methods suggested to him in the Novum 1 Cicero, Pro Dom. c. 44, "Habitare laxe voluit." VOL. III 2 G Organum; and so too, while he may please his fancy with allusions to the marvels of chivalrous romance, rabbinical tradition, and Greek mythology, his judgment is steadied, in this intoxicating atmosphere, by the philosophic form and order imposed by the training of classical humanism. To carry such a vast weight of imagination and learning, a metrical vehicle of extraordinary complexity was indispensable, and perhaps of all European languages English alone could have provided what was required. For in our tongue the Teutonic and the Latin genius unite, just as our constitution has been the instrument of reconciliation between the Norman and Saxon races, between monarchy and feudalism, between absolutism and republican freedom, between ecclesiastical tradition and the liberty of conscience. In Paradise Lost may be seen a vast extension of the old metrical law and order, imposed by the genius of Chaucer on what remained of the Saxon vocabulary. Nearly a hundred years before Milton, Spenser had given a new arrangement to the already half-forgotten Saxon words, by combining them in phrases imitated from the Latin, while Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan dramatists, by their adoption of blank verse, had shown how the sentence might be rhythmically extended beyond the limits within which it had been restricted by Chaucer's system of rhymes. What his predecessors had done instinctively and experimentally was by Milton elaborated into a regular system of verbal harmony. Retaining, as the dominant principle of his rhythm, the stately iambic march brought into the language from without, he quickened and varied it with the triple movement inherent in the old Saxon alliterative verse. He made use of alliteration itself as a means of preserving unity and continuity through his long and complex periods. Some of his words he drew, as Spenser had done, from old English sources; others he coined in a Greek or Latin mint, with a boldness exceeding that of his predecessors, Giles and Phineas Fletcher: he combined all of these in a syntax founded on the social idiom used by the dramatists, which he, however, raised above the ordinary level of speech to the required height of the subject by peculiar constructions imitated from the languages of antiquity. To find a parallel for such skilful metrical architecture, we must turn to the verse of Virgil, and even that example can only be compared to Milton's when allowance is made for the extent to which the subject of the Æneid is inferior in vastness and complexity to the subject of Paradise Lost. CHAPTER XV THE RESTORATION: THE POETS OF THE COURT DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM: EARL OF ROCHESTER: SIR CHARLES SEDLEY: EARL OF DORSET: EARL OF MULGRAVE: EARL OF ROSCOMMON. WHEN Charles II., on his thirtieth birthday, made his triumphant entry into London, men of reflection must have asked themselves what it was that was being restored in his person. The old medieval monarchy, with all its traditions, had fallen in the Civil War like the feudal castles demolished by Cromwell; but during the interregnum nothing permanent had risen in the place of the ruins. Would any attempt be made to rebuild the ancient fabric of morals, manners, and taste? or would the return from exile of the legitimate line of kings mark the beginning of a new social era? The influence likely to be exercised by the character of the King himself was for the present doubtful. Men remembered the gallantry Charles had shown on the field of Worcester, and his perseverance in maintaining his cause in the midst of great discouragement during the rule of the Protector. If they had heard reports of his loose behaviour in the days of his wanderings, they might fairly hope that experience and suffering would have taught him to exercise his recovered power with a due sense of responsibility. None could foresee how far in the direction of absolutism that soft and self-indulgent nature would be led in its eagerness to compensate the privations of exile by a reign of pleasure. "The King," says Burnet," said once to the Earl of Essex, as he told me, that he did not wish to be like a grand signior, with some mutes about him, and bags of bowstrings to strangle men as he had a mind to it: but he did not think he was a king as long as a company of fellows were looking into all his actions and examining his ministers as well as his accounts." Every one knew that, whatever happened, an end had come to the old Puritan régime. When Grammont visited England under the Protectorate in search of amusement, he was soon forced to retreat by the atmosphere of austere and sullen Puritanism surrounding the person of Cromwell. With the restoration of the monarchy, however, and under the auspices of a king, gay, witty, and a lover of art and letters, it was certain that, in one form or another, there would be a brilliant revival of Court life, and Dryden, after Charles's death, in a passage of glowing imagery, described the advent of the new spring :As when the new-born phoenix takes his way, His rich paternal regions to survey, So, glorious did our Charles return; The officious Muses came along, A gay harmonious quire, like angels ever young; The Muse that mourns him now his happy triumph sung. And such a plenteous crop they bore Of purest and well-winnowed grain, As Britain never knew before. Though little was their hire, and light their gain, Yet somewhat to their share he threw ; Fed from his hand they sung and flew, Like birds of paradise that lived on morning dew. Live blest above, almost invoked below, 1 Burnet, History of His Own Times, p. 345. |