trument.

At the time when blank verse was yielding to decay, Milton took it up,
and used it neither for conversational nor for rhetorical purposes. In
the interests of pure poetry and melody he tightened its joints,
stiffened its texture, and one by one gave up almost all the licenses
that the dramatists had used. From the first he makes a sparing use of
the double ending. The redundant syllable in the middle of the line,
which he sometimes allows himself in _Comus_, does not occur in _Paradise
Lost_. In the later poem he adopts strict practices with regard to
elision, which, with some trifling exceptions, he permits only in the
case of contiguous open vowels, and of short unstressed vowels separated
by a liquid consonant, in such words, for instance, as "dissolute," or
"amorous." By a variety of small observances, which, when fully stated,
make up a formidable code, he mended the shambling gait of the loose
dramatic blank verse, and made of it a worthy epic metre.

In a long poem variety is indispensable, and he preserved the utmost
freedom in some respects. He continually varies the stresses in the line,
their number, their weight, and their incidence, letting them fall, when
it pleases his ear, on the odd as well as on the even syllables of the
line. The pause or caesura he permits to fall at any place in the line,
usually towards the middle, but, on occasion, even after the first or
ninth syllables. His chief study, it will be found, is to vary the word
in relation to the foot, and the sentence in relation to the line. No
other metre allows of anything like the variety of blank verse in this
regard, and no other metrist makes so splendid a use of its freedom. He
never forgets the pattern; yet he never stoops to teach it by the
repetition of a monotonous tattoo. Hence there are, perhaps, fewer
one-line quotations to be found in the works of Milton than in the works
of any other master of blank verse. De Quincey speaks of the "slow
planetary wheelings" of Milton's verse, and the metaphor is a happy one;
the verse revolves on its axis at every line, but it always has another
motion, and is related to a more distant centre.

It may well be doubted whether Milton could have given a clear exposition
of his own prosody. In the only place where he attempts it he finds the
elements of musical delight to consist in "apt numbers, fit quantity of
syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into
another." By "