f North's _Plutarch_,
and hardly altering a word made noble poetry of it, so Milton can take
the Bible. "For now," says Job, "I should have lain still and been
quiet, I should have slept: then had I been at rest." North could not
rise to the height of this. But even this Milton will dare to lay his
hand upon: and, if even he cannot lift it any higher, only he could
have touched it at all without desecration. "How glad," says Adam--

"how glad would lay me down
As in my mother's lap! There I should rest,
And sleep secure."

Or take a passage like that of the Son of God clothing Adam and Eve
after the Fall, where {192} many Biblical suggestions are gathered
together--

"As when he washed his servants' feet, so now
As father of his family he clad
Their nakedness with skins of beasts, or slain,
Or, as the snake, with youthful coat repaid;
And thought not much to clothe his enemies."

The full appreciation of a passage like this, so very simple, so
apparently obvious, yet so entirely in the grand style which, whether
his subject stoops or soars, very rarely fails Milton, is not a thing
of one reading or of two. Milton, the greatest artist of our language,
is naturally the most conspicuous instance of the law which applies to
all great art. Only natures as rarely endowed with the receptive gift
as he was himself with the creative can fully appreciate his work at
the first reading. Like all great works of the imagination it has
generally to train, sometimes almost to create, the faculties which are
to appreciate it aright. This is particularly true in the case of
classical art, where the emotional appeal, though just as real, is much
less apparent because it is so much more controlled by intellectual
sanity. Gothic {193} and Romantic art are commonly far more
instantaneous in the impression they make, perhaps because, according
to the ingenious suggestion of the Poet Laureate, they admit at once of
more daring flights of the imagination and of stronger realism than
classical art can bear. But it may well be doubted whether the wonder
and delight which every man of the most modest aesthetic capacity owes
to them can in the end keep pace with the slower growing appreciation
of the universality and sanity of classical work. But this is an old
dispute not likely to be settled this year or next. Nor does it affect
the fact that all great work, even Romantic or Gothic, gains by time in
propo