father, virtuous son," and is reminded, before he has dined, that

He who of these delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.

But the qualities that make Milton a poor boon-companion are precisely
those which combine to raise his style to an unexampled loftiness, a
dignity that bears itself easily in society greater than human. To attain
to this height it was needful that there should be no aimless expatiation
of the intellect, no facile diffusion of the sympathies over the wide
field of human activity and human character. All the strength of mind and
heart and will that was in Milton went into the process of raising
himself. He is like some giant palm-tree; the foliage that sprang from it
as it grew has long since withered, the stem rises gaunt and bare; but
high up above, outlined against the sky, is a crown of perennial verdure.

It is essential for the understanding of Milton that we should take
account of the rare simplicity of his character. No subtleties; no tricks
of the dramatic intellect, which dresses itself in a hundred masquerading
costumes and peeps out of a thousand spy-holes; no development, one might
almost say, only training, and that self-imposed. There is but one
Milton, and he is throughout one and the same, in his life, in his prose,
and in his verse; from those early days, when we find him, an uncouth
swain,

With eager thought warbling his Doric lay,

to the last days when, amid a swarm of disasters, he approved himself
like Samson, and earned for himself the loftiest epitaph in the language,
his own--

Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame; nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.

The world has not wholly misunderstood or failed to appreciate this
extraordinary character, as one curious piece of evidence will serve to
show. Milton is one of the most egotistic of poets. He makes no secret of
the high value he sets upon his gifts--"gifts of God's imparting," as he
calls them, "which I boast not, but thankfully acknowledge, and fear also
lest at my certain account they be reckoned to me many rather than few."
Before he has so much as begun his great poem he covenants with his
reader "that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the
payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from
the heat of youth or the vapo