eformation; others as fast reading, trying all
things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement."

This sonorous balance of phrase and epithet cannot always escape what
Milton himself calls "the heathenish battology of multiplying words." It
serves the uses of rhetoric rather than of logic, and by the fervour of
its repetitions and enlargements unfits his prose for the plainer
purposes of argument or exposition. His argument is sometimes destroyed
or blemished by the fire that it kindles, his narrative overwhelmed in
the tide of passions that it sways.

His vocabulary is extraordinarily rich, and here again the contrast is
great between his prose and his verse. A full-bodied and picturesque
dictionary might be made of the words that occur only in the prose. Most
of these words would be found to derive from the Saxon stock, which
yields him almost all his store of invective and vituperation. The
resources of his Latinised vocabulary enable him to rise by successive
gyrations to a point of vantage above his prey, and then the downward
rush that strikes the quarry is a Saxon monosyllable. In this cardinal
point of art for those who have to do with the English speech he became
the teacher of Burke, who, with a lesser wealth of Saxon at his command,
employed it with a more telling parsimony.

Milton avoids no word of humble origin, so it serve his purpose. His
contempt finds voice in such expressions as to "huddle" prayers, and to
"keck" at wholesome food. Gehazi "rooks" from Naaman; the bishops "prog
and pander for fees," and are "the common stales to countenance every
politic fetch that was then on foot." The Presbyterians were earnest
enough "while pluralities greased them thick and deep"; the gentlemen who
accompanied King Charles in his assault on the privileges of the House of
Commons were "the spawn and shipwreck of taverns and dicing-houses." The
people take their religion from their minister "by scraps and mammocks,
as he dispenses it in his Sunday's dole"; and "the superstitious man by
his good will is an atheist, but being scared from thence by the pangs
and gripes of a boiling conscience, all in a pudder shuffles up to
himself such a God and such a worship as is most agreeable to remedy his
fear."

There were few incidents in Milton's career, from his personal relations
with his college tutor to his choice of blank verse for his epic, that he
was not called upon at some time or other in his life to ex