tion. The measure, he says, is the English heroick verse without rhyme. Of this mode he had many examples among the Italians, and some in his own country. The Earl of Surrey is said to have translated one of Virgil's books without rhyme; and, besides our tragedies, a few short poems had appeared in blank verse; particularly one tending to reconcile the nation to Raleigh's wild attempt upon Guiana, and probably written by Raleigh himself. These petty performances cannot be supposed to have much influenced Milton, who more probably took his hint from Trisino's Italia 10 Liberata; and, finding blank verse easier than rhyme, was desirous of persuading himself that it is better.

Rhyme, he says, and says truly, is no necessary adjunct of true poetry. But perhaps, of poetry as a mental operation, metre or musick is no necessary adjunct: it is however by the musick of metre that poetry has been discrimated in all languages; and in languages melodiously constructed with a due proportion of long and short syllables, metre is sufficient. But one language cannot communicate its rules to another : where metre is scanty and imperfect, some help is necessary. 20 The musick of the English heroick line strikes the ear so faintly that it is easily lost, unless all the syllables of every line co-operate together: this co-operation can be only obtained by the preservation of every verse unmingled with another, as a distinct system of sounds; and this distinctness is obtained and preserved by the artifice of rhyme. The variety of pauses, so much boasted by the lovers of blank verse, changes the measures of an English poet to the periods of a declaimer; and there are only a few skilful and happy_ readers of Milton, who enable their audience to perceive 30 where the lines end or begin. Blank verse, said an ingenious critick, seems to be verse only to the eye.

Poetry may subsist without rhyme, but English poetry will not often please; nor can rhyme ever be safely spared but where the subject is able to support itself. Blank verse makes some approach to that which is called the lapidary

style; has neither the easiness of prose, nor the melody of numbers, and therefore tires by long continuance. Of the Italian writers without rhyme, whom Milton alleges as precedents, not one is popular; what reason could urge in its defence, has been confuted by the ear.

But, whatever be the advantage of rhyme, I cannot prevail on myself to wish that Milton had been a rhymer; for I cannot wish his work to be other than it is; yet, like other heroes, he is to be admired rather than imitated. He that 10 thinks himself capable of astonishing, may write blank verse; but those that hope only to please, must condescend to rhyme.

The highest praise of genius is original invention. Milton cannot be said to have contrived the structure of an epick poem, and therefore owes reverence to that vigour and amplitude of mind to which all generations must be indebted for the art of poetical narration, for the texture of the fable, the variation of incidents, the interposition of dialogue, and all the stratagems that surprise and enchain attention. But, 20 of all the borrowers from Homer, Milton is perhaps the least indebted. He was naturally a thinker for himself, confident of his own abilities, and disdainful of help or hindrance: he did not refuse admission to the thoughts or images of his predecessors, but he did not seek them. From his contemporaries he neither courted nor received support; there is in his writings nothing by which the pride of other authors might be gratified, or favour gained; no exchange of praise, nor solicitation of support. His great works were performed under discountenance, and in blindness, but difficulties van30 ished at his touch; he was born for whatever is arduous; and his work is not the greatest of heroick poems, only because it is not the first.

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P. 1, 1. 4. Mr. Fenton's elegant Abridgement, Elijah Fenton (1683-1730), who assisted Pope in translating Homer's Odyssey, ' undertook,' says Johnson in his life of Fenton, to revise the punctuation of Milton's poems, which, as the author neither wrote the original copy nor corrected the press, was supposed capable of amendment. To this edition he prefixed a short and elegant account of Milton's life, written at once with tenderness and integrity' (Matthew Arnold, notes to The Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets). The more important of the Lives to which Johnson refers were those by Anthony Wood, in Athenæ Oxonienses, and by Edward Philips, or Phillips, Milton's nephew.

11. 7, 8. descended... Oxfordshire, Masson, Life of Milton, i. 8, 9, says that "as to the alleged Miltons of Milton in Oxfordshire, the remote progenitors of the poet, research has been fruitless, and that "Philips's tradition of the ruin of the family by the Wars of the Roses is but the repetition of a legend common to many families."

1. 9. the times of York and Lancaster, the Wars of the Roses.

1. 11. the White Rose, the House of York. keeper... Shotover, the royal forest of Shotover was a tract of wooded land between the village of Holton, or Halton, and Oxford; but, according to Masson, Life, i. 10-12, none of the Miltons discovered as living in or about Holton "corresponds in all points to the description of the poet's grandfather ... who was under-ranger of Shotover Forest ....

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1. 12. His grandfather John, according to Masson, the Christian name of Milton's grandfather was Richard, not John. 'One of the family [of the poet's ancestors], Richard Milton, of Stanton St. John's, yeoman, was very resolute in his adherence to the Old Religion, and is mentioned twice in the Recusant Rolls for Oxfordshire as among those who were heavily fined

towards the end of Elizabeth's reign (1601) for obstinate nonattendance at their parish-churches. He was the poet's grandfather, one of his sons, John Milton, being the poet's father" (Milton's Poetical Works, i. p. 296).

1. 13. disinherited, on account, it is said, of his turning Protestant.

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1. 16. scrivener, literally a copyist, notary; from O. F. escrivain, Lat. scriba, a scribe. "The business of a scrivener in Old London was an important, and sometimes a lucrative, one. consisted in the drawing up of wills, marriage settlements, and other deeds, the lending out of money for clients, and much else now done partly by attorneys and partly by law-stationers " (Masson, P. W. i. 297).

1. 18. profession, sc. of scrivener.

11. 19, 20. had... more... literature, was a man of more than ordinary acquaintance with literature. To have' in this sense was a common idiom in former days with such words as 'learning,' 'literature,' 'scholarship,' etc.

1. 21. one of... poems, that entitled "Ad Patrem," an hexameter poem of a hundred and twenty lines written when Milton was staying with his father at Horton in Buckinghamshire in 1632 or 1633.

1. 22. of the name... family, according to one tradition her maiden name was Sarah Bradshaw; according to another, Sarah Caston; but recent researches have proved that her mother was wife of a Paul Jeffrey or Jeffreys, of an Essex family, and unless this lady was married more than once the maiden name of Milton's mother must have been Jeffrey or Jeffreys; "and it was probably," says Bradshaw, Milton's Poetical Works, Aldine ed., p. xviii., "her mother whom Aubrey discovered to be a Bradshaw."

1. 24. as the law taught him, here, as frequently in the Life, Johnson's Tory principles show themselves.

1. 25. the King's party, the royalist cause. For this adherence, and for having served as one of the King's Commissioners for sequestrating the estates of the Parliamentarians, he had, in 1646, to make submission to Parliament by taking the Covenant, and to sue out pardon by paying a fine on his property. After the Restoration he continued to practice as a barrister, and became a Bencher of the Inner Temple and Deputy Recorder of Ipswich. In 1686 he was sworn one of the Barons of the Exchequer, his character and the fact of his having become a Catholic recommending him to James. At the Revolution he retired into private life, and died at Ipswich in 1692, in his seventy-seventh year.

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1. 26. in quiet, free from persecution.

P. 2, 1. 1. chamber-practice, such as conveyancing, giving a legal opinion upon matters in dispute, without the necessity of appearing as counsel in Court.

1. 4. disreputable compliances, any act of surrendering his principles in compliance with the religious views of James the Second.

11. 6, 7. whom he married... Philips, this was in 1624; Edward Philips, or Phillips, was second clerk in the Government office called the Crown Office in Chancery.

11. 10, 11. at the Spread Eagle, "In those days, houses in cities were not numbered as now; and persons in business, to whom it was of consequence to have a distinct address, effected the purpose by exhibiting over their door some sign or emblem... The scrivener Milton had a sign as well as his neighbors. It was an eagle with outstretched wings; and hence his house was known as the Spread Eagle in Bread Street" (Masson, Life, i. 2). 1. 13. Bread Street, running south from Cheapside, then as now one of the main thoroughfares of the City between Ludgate Hill and Cornhill. The street of Milton's day was destroyed in

the Great Fire, 1666.

1. 16. Thomas Young, "afterwards a Puritan minister ... and well known in his later life as a prominent divine of the Puritan party" (Masson, Life, i. 44).

1. 20. St. Paul's School, founded by Dean Colet, the friend of Erasmus, in 1512.

1. 21. Gill, Alexander, M.A., of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, appointed in 1608.

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1. 22. entered a sizar, this is not correct. Milton entered as a "lesser pensioner " ("pensionarius minor," in the list of entries given by Masson, Life, i. 75, 6), the three classes of students being then, as he points out, greater pensioner,' corresponding with the 'fellow-commoner' of modern times, 'lesser pensioner, and 'sizar.' A sizar at Cambridge, corresponding with a servitor at Oxford, is a student who pays lower fees than a pensioner or ordinary student, and has certain allowances of food made to him, which are called sizings, the word size being an abbreviation of assize, i.e. quantity or ration of bread, etc. In former days a sizar had to perform certain menial duties, and his social position was much lower than that of a pensioner. To "enter" a sizar, pensioner, fellow-commoner (not 'enter as' a sizar, etc.), was and still is the technical phraseology at the Universities.

1. 26. the learned Politian, an Italian poet and dramatist (14541494) famous for his Latin as well as his Italian poems. These