poets.  His Latin verse, for elegance and correctness, ranks with Addison’s; and his Italian poems were the admiration of the Tuscan scholars.  But his learning appears in his poetry only in the form of a fine and chastened result, and not in laborious allusion and pedantic citation, as too often in Ben Jonson, for instance.  “My father,” he wrote, “destined me, while yet a little child, for the study of humane letters.”  He was also destined for the ministry, but, “coming to some maturity of years and perceiving what tyrany had invaded the Church,...I thought it better to prefer a blameless silence, before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing.”  Other hands than a bishop’s were laid upon his head.  “He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter,” he says, “ought himself to be a true poem.”  And he adds that his “natural haughtiness” saved him from all impurity of living.  Milton had a sublime self-respect.  The dignity and earnestness of the Puritan gentleman blended in his training with the culture of the Renaissance.  Born into an age of spiritual conflict, he dedicated his gift to the service of Heaven, and he became, like Heine, a valiant soldier in the war for liberation.  He was the poet of a cause, and his song was keyed to

                              the Dorian mood
  Of flutes and soft recorders such as raised
  To height of noblest temper, heroes old
  Arming to battle.

On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in intense personal conviction.  He introduced a new note into English poetry:  the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity.  Milton’s was an heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than dramatic; its singer must be in the fight and of it.

Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge the most important was his splendid ode On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity.  At Horton he wrote, among other things, the companion pieces, L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an expression in harmony with the two contrasted moods. Comus, which belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elizabethan court masque, and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, on the occasion of the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales.  Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of Circe, with her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song in praise of chastity and temperance. Lycidas, in like manner, was the perfection of the Elizabethan pastoral elegy.  It was contributed to a volume of memorial verses on the death of Edward King, a Cambridge friend of Milton’s, who was drowned in the Irish Channel in 1637.  In one stern strain, which is put into the mouth of St. Peter, the author “foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy, then at their height.”