or harbour in an uncongenial mate.  Milton, no doubt, entirely meant what he said when he told Diodati:  “I am letting my wings grow and preparing to fly, but my Pegasus has not yet feathers enough to soar aloft in the fields of air.”  But the danger of this protracted preparation was shown by his narrow escape from poetical shipwreck when the duty of the patriot became paramount to that of the poet.  The Civil War confounded his anticipations of leisurely composition, and but for the disguised blessing of his blindness, the mountain of his attainment might have been Pisgah rather than Parnassus.

It is in keeping with the infrequency of Milton’s moods of overmastering inspiration, and the strength of will which enabled him to write steadily or abstain from writing at all, that his early compositions should be, in general, so much more correct than those of other English poets of the first rank.  The childish bombast of “Titus Andronicus,” the commonplace of Wordsworth, the frequent inanity of the youthful Coleridge and the youthful Byron, Shelley’s extravagance, Keats’s cockneyism, Tennyson’s mawkishness, find no counterpart in Milton’s early compositions.  All these great writers, though the span of some of them was but short, lived long enough to blush for much of what they had in the days of their ignorance taken for poetry.  The mature Milton had no cause to be ashamed of anything written by the immature Milton, reasonable allowance being made for the inevitable infection of contemporary false taste.  As a general rule, the youthful exuberance of a Shakespeare would be a better sign; faults, no less than beauties, often indicate the richness of the soil.  But Milton was born to confute established opinions.  Among other divergencies from usage, he was at this time a rare example of an English poet whose faculty was, in large measure, to be estimated by his essays in Latin verse.  England had up to this time produced no distinguished Latin poet, though Scotland had:  and had Milton’s Latin poems been accessible, they would certainly have occupied a larger place in the estimation of his contemporaries than his English compositions.  Even now they contribute no trifling addition to his fame, though they cannot, even as exercises, be placed in the highest rank.  There are two roads to excellence in Latin verse—­to write it as a scholar, or to write it as a Roman.  England has once, and only once, produced a poet so entirely imbued with the Roman spirit that Latin seemed to come to him like the language of some prior state of existence, rather remembered than learned.  Landor’s Latin verse is hence greatly superior to Milton’s, not, perhaps, in scholarly elegance, but in absolute vitality.  It would be poor praise to commend it for fidelity to the antique, for it is the antique.  Milton stands at the head of the numerous class who, not being actually born Romans, have all but made themselves so.  “With a great sum obtained I this freedom.”  His