80
pounds, out of a new epic, even if it were as great as Milton's.

But the money question was not of the first importance to Milton and is
of none to us. The interesting thing is the almost immediate
recognition of the greatness of the poem. Nothing in the world could
be more alien to the tone of the society and literature of the London
of Charles II than this long Biblical Puritan poem with its scarcely
veiled attacks on the revived Monarchy and Episcopacy and its entirely
unveiled attacks on the fashionable men of Belial. Yet it was from the
very high priests of this society that the most unstinted praise came.
Of its professional men of {81} letters Dryden was already rapidly
advancing to the unquestioned primacy which was soon to be his, and to
remain his for his life; of its amateurs Lord Dorset had perhaps the
most brilliant reputation. It was these two men who, more than any
others, made the town recognize the greatness of Milton. Both were as
unlike Milton as men could be, and Dryden had just committed himself to
a strong championship of rhymed verse as against blank. There is
nowhere a finer proof of the compelling power of great art upon those
who know it when they see it than the unbounded praise with which
Dryden at once saluted Milton. The fact that his admiration at first
took the absurd form of turning Milton's epic into a "heroic opera" in
rhyme does not detract from the significance of his writing publicly
within a year of Milton's death that the blind old regicide's poem was
"one of the greatest, most noble and sublime which either this age or
nation has produced," and to this he was to add, thirteen years later,
the still bolder tribute of the well-known epigram about "three poets
in three distant ages born" which gives Milton a place above Homer and
Virgil. The lines are in detail absurd; but their absurdity does not
destroy the fact that the intellectual life of England was never {82}
keener, or more eager to welcome talent in art or letters, than in the
reign of Charles II; and nothing is clearer proof of it than the
honours received by the rebel Milton from a Court composer like Henry
Lawes, a Court physician like Samuel Barrow, a statesman and minister
like Lord Anglesey, and a poet laureate like Dryden.

So we may think of him happily enough in these last years. He had now
done the work which from his early manhood he had felt it was his task
in life to do. When he was not much over