some measure be compassed, I refuse not to sustain this expectation.”  This is not the ideal of a mere scholar, as Mark Paulson thinks he at one time was, and would wish him to have remained.  “Affairs” are placed fully on a level with “arts.”  Milton was kept from politics in his youth, not by any notion of their incompatibility with poetry; but by the more cogent arguments at their command “under whose inquisitious and tyrannical duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish.”

Milton’s poetical development is, in many respects, exceptional.  Most poets would no doubt, in theory, agree with Landor, “febriculis non indicari vires, impatientiam ab ignorantia non differre,” but their faith will not be proved by lack of works, as Landor’s precept and example require.  He, who like Milton lisps in numbers usually sings freely in adolescence; he who is really visited by a true inspiration generally depends on mood rather than on circumstance.  Milton, on the other hand, until fairly embarked on his great epic, was comparatively an unproductive, and literally an occasional poet.  Most of his pieces, whether English or Latin, owe their existence to some impulse from without:  “Comus” to the solicitation of a patron, “Lycidas” to the death of a friend.  The “Allegro” and the “Penseroso” seem almost the only two written at the urgency of an internal impulse; and perhaps, if we knew their history, we should discover that they too were prompted by extraneous suggestion or provoked into being by accident.  Such is the way with Court poets like Dryden and Claudian; it is unlike the usual procedure of Milton’s spiritual kindred.  Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, write incessantly; whatever care they may bestow upon composition, the impulse to produce is never absent.  With Milton it is commonly dormant or ineffectual; he is always studying, but the fertility of his mind bears no apparent proportion to the pains devoted to its cultivation.  He is not, like Wordsworth, labouring at a great work whose secret progress fills him with a majestic confidence; or, like Coleridge, dreaming of works which he lacks the energy to undertake; or, save once, does he seem to have felt with Keats:—­

   “Fears that I may cease to be
      Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
    Before that books, in high piled charactery,
      Hold in rich garners the full ripened grain.”

He neither writes nor wishes to write; he simply studies, piling up the wood on the altar, and conscious of the power to call down fire from Heaven when he will.  There is something sublime in this assured confidence; yet its wisdom is less evident than its grandeur.  “No man,” says Shelley, “can say, ‘I will compose poetry.’” If he cannot say this of himself to-day, still less can he say it of himself to-morrow.  He cannot tell whether the illusions of youth will forsake him wholly; whether the joy of creation will cease to thrill; what unpropitious blight he may encounter in an enemy or a creditor,