turned this way and that in his
mind, to test their fitness for a monumental work, shows itself in his
choice of figure and allusion. Attention has often been called to the
elaborate comparison, founded on the history of Samson, in _The Reason of
Church Government urged against Prelaty_:--

"I cannot better liken the state and person of a king than to that mighty
Nazarite Samson; who being disciplined from his birth in the precepts and
the practice of temperance and sobriety, without the strong drink of
injurious and excessive desires, grows up to a noble strength and
perfection with those his illustrious and sunny locks, the laws, waving
and curling about his god-like shoulders. And while he keeps them about
him undiminished and unshorn, he may with the jawbone of an ass, that is,
with the word of his meanest officer, suppress and put to confusion
thousands of those that rise against his just power. But laying down his
head among the strumpet flatteries of prelates, while he sleeps and
thinks no harm, they, wickedly shaving off all those bright and weighty
tresses of his law, and just prerogatives, which were his ornament and
strength, deliver him over to indirect and violent counsels, which, as
those Philistines, put out the fair and far-sighted eyes of his natural
discerning, and make him grind in the prison-house of their sinister ends
and practices upon him: till he, knowing this prelatical rasor to have
bereft him of his wonted might, nourish again his puissant hair, the
golden beams of law and right; and they, sternly shook, thunder with ruin
upon the heads of those his evil counsellors, but not without great
affliction to himself."

This ingenious allegorical application naturally finds no place in the
grave poem of Milton's latest years. And yet, in one passage at least,
his earlier love for the high-figured style took him captive again. The
strong drink from which the Samson of the play abstains is strong drink,
not "injurious and excessive desires." There is no hint of prelatical
conspiracy in the enticements of Dalila. But perhaps some faint
reminiscence of his earlier fable concerning Samson's hair recurred to
Milton's mind when he gave to Manoa a speech comparing the locks of the
hero to the strength, not of the law, but of a nation in arms:--

And I persuade me God had not permitted
His strength again to grow up with his hair,
Garrisoned round about him like a camp
Of faithful soldiery, were no