“Reliques, beads,
    Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls,”

has tempted him to chequer the sublime with the ludicrous.

No subject but a Biblical one would have insured Milton universal popularity among his countrymen, for his style is that of an ancient classic transplanted, like Aladdin’s palace set down with all its magnificence in the heart of Africa; and his diction, the delight of the educated, is the despair of the ignorant man.  Not that this diction is in any respect affected or pedantic.  Milton was the darling poet of our greatest modern master of unadorned Saxon speech, John Bright.  But it is freighted with classic allusion—­not alone from the ancient classics—­and comes to us rich with gathered sweets, like a wind laden with the scent of many flowers.  “It is,” says Pattison, “the elaborated outcome of all the best words of all antecedent poetry—­the language of one who lives in the companionship of the great and the wise of past time.”  “Words,” the same writer reminds us, “over and above their dictionary signification, connote all the feeling which has gathered round them by reason of their employment through a hundred generations of song.”  So it is, every word seems instinct with its own peculiar beauty, and fraught with its own peculiar association, and yet each detail is strictly subordinate to the general effect.  No poet of Milton’s rank, probably, has been equally indebted to his predecessors, not only for his vocabulary, but for his thoughts.  Reminiscences throng upon him, and he takes all that comes, knowing that he can make it lawfully his own.  The comparison of Satan’s shield to the moon, for instance, is borrowed from the similar comparison of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, but what goes in Homer comes out Milton.  Homer merely says that the huge and massy shield emitted a lustre like that of the moon in heaven.  Milton heightens the resemblance by giving the shield shape, calls in the telescope to endow it with what would seem preternatural dimensions to the naked eye, and enlarges even these by the suggestion of more than the telescope can disclose—­

                   “His ponderous shield,
    Ethereal temper, massy, large, and round
    Behind him cast; the broad circumference
    Hung on his shoulders like the moon, whose orb
    Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views
    At evening, from the top of Fesole,
    Or in Valdarno, to descry new lands,
    Rivers or mountains in her spotty globe.”

Thus does Milton appropriate the wealth of past literature, secure of being able to recoin it with his own image and superscription.  The accumulated learning which might have choked the native fire of a feebler spirit was but nourishment to his.  The polished stones and shining jewels of his superb mosaic are often borrowed, but its plan and pattern are his own.