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from either Shelley or Wordsworth. His feeling for Milton's poetry was primarily aesthetic. The richness of Milton's expression, "poetical luxury," as Keats called it, was naturally attractive to his temperament, but he learned to admire the restraint and dignity which elevated Milton above his own earlier masters. Keats's enthusiastic study of Paradise Lost just after he had written Endymion is rightly held to have been of great influence in disciplining and ennobling his later work. His Hyperion represents an attempt to compose a blank verse epic on the Miltonic plane. In both conception and style, the poem owes much to Paradise Lost. It was abandoned, because Keats felt himself to be doing violence to his own genius in adopting a poetical mode which was, after all, alien to his own. Taken as a whole, the romantic period, though its view of Milton was colored by its own emotions, stood close to him in imaginative sympathy and was better able than the eighteenth century to value his true poetic quality.

The decline which may be traced in the popular vogue of Milton through the later nineteenth century is to be attributed in part to the rise of a modern romantic literature, which rendered him less necessary as a rallying point for poetical enthusiasm, in part to his increasing remoteness in an age no longer thoroughly disciplined in classical knowledge and thought,-an age, also, for which the system of theological ideas on which he built has become largely obsolete. Milton is no longer in the degree he was for over a century after his death a theme of heated controversy. He has become a classic, and as such is abandoned to the limited audience of those who are equipped to read him. For poets, his supreme mastery of the language of the gods, though no longer a thing to imitate,

continues to be an inspiration. Tennyson, Meredith, Swinburne, and others have paid him tribute.

Meanwhile, the scholarly study of his life and work has been carried to a point far beyond that reached by the activity of the eighteenth century. The collected edition of the poetry and prose published by John Mitford in 1851 has remained standard to the present time, while the Bohn edition of the prose, issued in the same year, with its translations of the Latin works, has been an available means of access to these materials. It is, however, upon the monumental biography of David Masson, the first volume of which appeared in 1859 13 and the last in 1894, that modern knowledge of Milton chiefly rests. Masson's indefatigable labors in the records and pamphlets of the Puritan period, and his minute attention to every detail in the remotest degree related to Milton, have made his work, though of oppressive magnitude, the one indispensable body of biographical information. It has remained for later biographers, like Mark Pattison, to construct interpretations of the man and poet, according to their individual insight, out of these materials.

In more recent years the paraphernalia of Milton study has been enriched by dictionaries of his language and allusions and by the fuller and more learned annotation of his poems. There has also been an effort to see him clearly in his intellectual as earlier students had done in his literary and poetical relationships. With the decline of active prejudice against his theology there has come a higher valuation of his original contribution as a humane and philosophical thinker.14 Connected with this interest

13 A revision of this volume was published in 1881.

14 A bibliography of this movement is given by Saurat in his Milton, Man and Thinker.

in his ideas there is, particularly on the Continent, an active and somewhat disillusioned discussion of his personality and an attempt to analyze from the modern standpoint the relation between his personal experience and his art.15 Such a renewal of inquiry, even if it challenges the heroworship of Macaulay and Masson, is a tribute to Milton's extraordinary power, through successive generations, of remaining a matter of concern to men.

15 See the long discussion provoked by Liljegren's Studies and Mutschmann's fantastic Milton und das Licht in Anglia, Englische Studien, Neophilologus etc., since 1920.

APPENDIX

MILTON'S "BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA"

F the various passages in the prose works in which
Milton

fidence regarding his own inmost thoughts and aspirations two are outstanding as autographic revelations of his poetical development up to the time when he began to draft the plans of Paradise Lost. First to be considered is a statement in the Apology for Smectymnuus concerning the development of his ideals of chastity, written in answer to slanderous accusations by Bishop Hall, but constituting an independent record of the successive phases of his emotional life from the beginning of his University career to the close of the Horton period. As a commentary upon his own early poetical work and the literary influences under the stimulus of which it was composed, this document is worth volumes of criticism. Milton has analyzed the stages of his inner life as clearly if not so fully as Wordsworth did his own in The Prelude. I give the passage as a whole with an interpretation of its statements in the light of the record of Milton's youthful poetry.1

I had my time, readers, as others have, who have good learning bestowed upon them, to be sent to those places where, the opinion was, it might soonest be obtained; and as the 1 For a fuller analysis see Hanford, The Youth of Milton.

manner is, was not unstudied in those authors which are most commended. Whereof some were grave orators and historians, whose matter methought I loved indeed, but as my age then was, so I understood them; others were the smooth elegiac poets, whereof the schools are not scarce, whom both for the pleasing sound of their numerous writing, which in imitation I found most easy, and most agreeable to nature's part in me, and for their matter, which what it is there be few who know not, I was so allured to read, that no recreation came to me better welcome. For that it was then those years with me which are excused, though they be least severe, I may be saved the labour to remember ye. Whence having observed them to account it the chief glory of their wit, in that they were able to judge, to praise, and by that could esteem themselves worthiest to love those high perfections, which under one or other name they took to celebrate; I thought to myself by every instinct and presage of nature, which is not wont to be false, that what emboldened them to this task, might with such diligence as they used embolden me; and that what judgment, wit, or elegance was my share, would herein best appear, and best value itself, by how much more wisely, and with more love of virtue I should choose (let rude ears be absent) the object of not unlike praises. For albeit these thoughts to some will seem virtuous and commendable, to others only pardonable, to a third sort perhaps idle; yet the mentioning of them now will end in serious.

Nor blame it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a reward, as the noblest dispositions above other things in this life have sometimes preferred: whereof not to be sensible when good and fair in one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and withal an ungentle and swainish breast. For by the firm settling of these persuasions, I became, to my best memory, so much a proficient, that if I found those authors anywhere speaking unworthy

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