II.  STYLE AND MANNER

Where Milton’s style is fine it is very fine, but it is always liable to the danger of degenerating into mannerism.  Nay, where the imagination is absent and the artifice remains, as in some of the theological discussions in “Paradise Lost,” it becomes mannerism of the most wearisome kind.  Accordingly, he is easily parodied and easily imitated.  Philips, in his “Splendid Shilling,” has caught the trick exactly: 

  Not blacker tube nor of a shorter size
  Smokes Cambrobriton (versed in pedigree,
  Sprung from Cadwallader and Arthur, kings
  Full famous in romantic tale) when he,
  O’er many a craggy hill and barren cliff,
  Upon a cargo of famed Cestrian cheese
  High overshadowing rides, with a design
  To vend his wares or at the Arvonian mart. 
  Or Maridunum, or the ancient town
  Yclept Brechinia, or where Vaga’s stream
  Encircles Ariconium, fruitful soil.

Philips has caught, I say, Milton’s trick; his real secret he could never divine, for where Milton is best, he is incomparable.  But all authors in whom imagination is a secondary quality, and whose merit lies less in what they say than in the way they say it, are apt to become mannerists, and to have imitators, because manner can be easily imitated.  Milton has more or less colored all blank verse since his time, and, as those who imitate never fail to exaggerate, his influence has in some respects been mischievous.  Thomson was well-nigh ruined by him.  In him a leaf cannot fall without a Latinism, and there is circumlocution in the crow of a cock.  Cowper was only saved by mixing equal proportions of Dryden in his verse, thus hitting upon a kind of cross between prose and poetry.  In judging Milton, however, we should not forget that in verse the music makes a part of the meaning, and that no one before or since has been able to give to simple pentameters the majesty and compass of the organ.  He was as much composer as poet.

How is it with Shakespeare? did he have no style?  I think I find the proof that he had it, and that of the very highest and subtlest kind, in the fact that I can nowhere put my finger on it, and say it is here or there.[1]

[Footnote 1:  In his essay, “Shakespeare Once More” (Works, in, pp. 36-42), published in 1868, Mr. Lowell has treated of Shakespeare’s style in a passage of extraordinary felicity and depth of critical judgment.]

I do not mean that things in themselves artificial may not be highly agreeable.  We learn by degrees to take a pleasure in the mannerism of Gibbon and Johnson.  It is something like reading Latin as a living language.  But in both these cases the man is only present by his thought.  It is the force of that, and only that, which distinguishes them from their imitators, who easily possess themselves of everything else.  But with Burke, who has true