the storms of
chaos, dark save for some faint glimmerings from the wall of heaven, the
inhabitants a disordered and depraved multitude of philosophers,
crusaders, monks, and friars, blown like leaves into the air by the winds
that sweep those desert tracts. Unlike the Paradise that was lost, this
paradise is wholly of Milton's invention, and is the best extant monument
to that spirit of mockery and savage triumph which is all the humour that
he knows.

The style of his prose works is a style formed upon oratorical models.
The long winding sentence, propped on epithets and festooned with
digressions, was the habitual vehicle of his meaning. The effect it
produces at its best was well described by Marvell, who, in a letter to
Milton thanking him for a copy of the _Defence of the People of England_,
remarks: "When I consider how equally it turns and rises with so many
figures, it seems to me a Trajan's column, in whose winding ascent we see
embossed the several monuments of your learned victories." The clink of
the rhyming couplet was not more displeasing to Milton's ear than the
continued emphatic bark of a series of short sentences. Accustomed as he
was to the heavy-armed processional manner of scholarly Renaissance
prose, he felt it an indignity to "lie at the mercy of a coy, flirting
style; to be girded with frumps and curtal jibes, by one who makes
sentences by the statute, as if all above three inches long were
confiscate." Later on in the _Apology_ he returns to this grievance, and
describes how his adversary "sobs me out half a dozen phthisical mottoes,
wherever he had them, hopping short in the measure of convulsion fits; in
which labour the agony of his wit having escaped narrowly, instead of
well-sized periods, he greets us with a quantity of thumb-ring posies."
The men of the Renaissance despised the homely savour of the native
English syntax with its rude rhetoric and abrupt logic and its lore of
popular adages and maxims; they had learned to taste a subtler pleasure
in the progressive undulations of a long mobile sentence, rising and
falling alternately, reaching the limit of its height towards the middle,
and at the close either dying away or breaking in a sudden crash of
unexpected downward emphasis. This is the sentence preferred by Milton,
and, where haste or zeal does not interfere with the leisurely ordering,
handled by him with excellent skill. At its best and at its worst alike
his prose is the prose