SOURCE: "Sytax and Persuasion," in The Politics of Milton's Prose Style, Yale University Press, 1975, pp. 3-26.

Below, Stavely compares Milton's syntax and style with those of several contemporaneous political polemicists and demonstrates that his selective use of the Ciceronian model of rhetoric—unfashionable at the time—aptly facilitated his millennial message.

In the studies of seventeenth-century prose style that have appeared since Morris W. Croll's pioneering work on the subject, Milton has usually either been ignored or classified as a Ciceronian.¹ Milton indeed expressed his distaste for both the "loose" and "curt" varieties of the prevailing anti-Ciceronian fashion:

He that cannot understand the sober, plain, and unaffected stile of the Scriptures, will be ten times more puzzl'd with the knotty Africanisms, the pamper'd metafors; the intricat, and involv'd sentences of the Fathers; besides the fantastick, and declamatory flashes; the crosse-jingling periods which cannot but disturb, and come thwart...