[Footnote 8:  Poetics, II.  Sec. 26.

A judicious intermixture is requisite ...  It is without reason, therefore, that some critics have censured these modes of speech, and ridiculed the poet for the use of them; as old Euclid did, objecting that versification would be an easy business, if it were permitted to lengthen words at pleasure, and then giving a burlesque example of that sort of diction...  In the employment of all the species of unusual words, moderation is necessary:  for metaphors, foreign words, or any of the others improperly used, and with a design to be ridiculous, would produce the same effect.  But how great a difference is made by a proper and temperate use of such words may be seen in heroic verse.  Let any one put common words in the place of the metaphorical, the foreign, and others of the same kind, and he will be convinced of the truth of what I say.

He then gives two or three examples of the effect of changing poetical for common words.  As, that (in plays now lost): 

the same Iambic verse occurs in AEschylus and Euripides; but by means of a single alteration—­the substitution of a foreign for a common and usual word—­one of these verses appears beautiful, the other ordinary.  For AEschylus in his Philoctetes says, “The poisonous wound that eats my flesh.”  But Euripides for ([Greek:  esthiei]) “eats” says ([Greek:  thoinatai]) “banquets on.”]

[Footnote 9:  [this]]

[Footnote 10:  This is not particularly observed.  On the very first page of P. L. we have a line with the final y twice sounded before a vowel,

  Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song.

Again a few lines later,

  That to the height of this great argument
  I may assert Eternal Providence.

Ten lines farther we read of the Serpent

  Stirr’d up with envy and revenge.

We have only an apparent elision of y a few lines later in his aspiring

  To set himself in glory above his peers,

for the line would be ruined were the y to be omitted by a reader.  The extreme shortness of the two unaccented syllables, y and a, gives them the quantity of one in the metre, and allows by the turn of voice a suggestion of exuberance, heightening the force of the word glory.  Three lines lower Milton has no elision of the y before a vowel in the line,

  Against the throne and monarchy of God.

Nor eight lines after that in the words day and night.  There is elision of y in the line,

  That were an ignominy and shame beneath
  This downfall.

But none a few lines lower down in

  Sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven.

When the y stands by itself, unaccented, immediately after an accented syllable, and precedes a vowel that is part of another unaccented syllable standing immediately before an accented one, Milton accepts the consequence, and does not attempt to give it the force of a distinct syllable.  But Addison’s vague notion that it was Milton’s custom to cut off the final y when it precedes a vowel, and that for the sake of being uncommon, came of inaccurate observation.  For the reasons just given, the y of the word glory runs into the succeeding syllable, and most assuredly is not cut off, when we read of