ouse. Had Milton been called upon for such a decision he would doubtless
have ruled that the word is applicable only to Members whose deliberate
intention is to maim or destroy the constitution of Parliament.

But he was not content to revive the exact classical meaning in place of
the vague or weak English acceptation; he often kept both senses, and
loaded the word with two meanings at once. When Samson speaks of Dalila
as

That specious monster, my accomplished snare--

something of this double sense resides in both epithets. In two words we
are told that Dalila was both beautiful and deceitful, that she was
skilled in the blandishments of art, and successful in the work of her
husband's undoing. With a like double reference Samson calls the secret
of his strength "my capital secret." Where light, again, is called the
"prime work of God," or where we are told that Hell saw "Heaven ruining
from Heaven," the original and derivative senses of the words "prime" and
"ruin" are united in the conception. These words, and many others
similarly employed, are of Latin origin; but Milton carried his practice
over into the Saxon part of our vocabulary. The word "uncouth" is used in
a double-barrelled sense in the Second Book of _Paradise Lost_--

Who shall tempt with wandering feet
The dark, unbottomed, infinite Abyss,
And through the palpable obscure find out
His uncouth way?

And when Satan's eyes are called "baleful," the word, besides indicating
the "huge affliction and dismay" that he feels, gives a hint of the woes
that are in store for the victims on whom those eyes have not yet lit.

It was this habit of "verbal curiosity" and condensation which seduced
Milton into punning. Some of his puns are very bad. There is a modern
idea that a pun is a thing to laugh at. Milton's puns, like
Shakespeare's, give no smallest countenance to this theory. Sometimes he
plays with what is merely a chance identity of sound, as where Satan,
entering Paradise--

At one slight bound high overleapt all bound.

But in most of these cases it seems likely that he believed in an
etymological relation between the two words, and so fancied that he was
drawing attention to an original unity of meaning. Some such hypothesis
is needful to mitigate the atrocity of his worst pun, in _Paradise
Regained_, where he describes

The ravens with their horny beaks
Food to Elijah bringing even and morn--
Though ravenou