But that two-handed engine at the door
  Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.

This was Milton’s last utterance in English verse before the outbreak of the civil war, and it sounds the alarm of the impending struggle.  In technical quality Lycidas is the most wonderful of all Milton’s poems.  The cunningly intricate harmony of the verse, the pressed and packed language, with its fullness of meaning and allusion, make it worthy of the minutest study.  In these early poems, Milton, merely as a poet, is at his best.  Something of the Elizabethan style still clings to them; but their grave sweetness, their choice wording, their originality in epithet, name, and phrase, were novelties of Milton’s own.  His English masters were Spenser, Fletcher, and Sylvester, the translator of Du Bartas’s La Semaine, but nothing of Spenser’s prolixity, or Fletcher’s effeminacy, or Sylvester’s quaintness is found in Milton’s pure, energetic diction.  He inherited their beauties, but his taste had been tempered to a finer edge by his studies in Greek and Hebrew poetry.  He was the last of the Elizabethans, and his style was at once the crown of the old and a departure into the new.  In masque, elegy, and sonnet he set the seal to the Elizabethan poetry, said the last word, and closed one great literary era.

In 1639 the breach between Charles I. and his Parliament brought Milton back from Italy.  “I thought it base to be traveling at my ease for amusement, while my fellow-countrymen at home were fighting for liberty.”  For the next twenty years he threw himself into the contest, and poured forth a succession of tracts, in English and Latin, upon the various public questions at issue.  As a political thinker, Milton had what Bacon calls “the humor of a scholar.”  In a country of endowed grammar schools and universities hardly emerged from a mediaeval discipline and curriculum, he wanted to set up Greek gymnasia and philosophical schools, after the fashion of the Porch and the Academy.  He would have imposed an Athenian democracy upon a people trained in the traditions of monarchy and episcopacy.  At the very moment when England had grown tired of the Protectorate and was preparing to welcome back the Stuarts, he was writing An Easy and Ready Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.  Milton acknowledged that in prose he had the use of his left hand only.  There are passages of fervid eloquence, where the style swells into a kind of lofty chant, with a rhythmical rise and fall to it, as in parts of the English Book of Common Prayer.  But in general his sentences are long and involved, full of inversions and latinized constructions.  Controversy at that day was conducted on scholastic lines.  Each disputant, instead of appealing at once to the arguments of expediency and common sense, began with a formidable display of learning, ransacking Greek and Latin authors and the Fathers of the Church for opinions in support of his