postpone exposition and to trust that the learner will grow up to the
insight which he as yet does not possess and which we cannot possibly
give him. A learned writer, like Milton, who has read all antiquity, and
who has no purpose of writing for children, inevitably contemplates a
public of men approximately his equals in culture, and expects to find
"fit audience, though few."

But many of the difficulties that confront the beginner in Milton ask
only to be explained at once by some one who has had more experience in
the older literature. Archaic forms of words and expressions, with which
the ripe student is familiar, worry the tyro, and must be accounted for.
Often the common dictionaries will give all needed help; but the best
means of acquiring speedy familiarity with obsolete and rare forms is a
Milton concordance--such as that of Bradshaw--in connection with the
Century Dictionary, or with the Oxford Dictionary, so far as this goes.
These means of easy research should be at hand. I find that pupils often
need a pretty sharp spur to make them use even their abridged
dictionaries. But so far as concerns acquaintance with the vocabulary of
poetic diction, nothing will do except the dictionary habit, accompanied
by an effort of the memory to retain what has been learned.

Difficulties that lurk in an involved syntax the pupil may usually be
expected to solve by study. But such a peculiar construction as that in
Sonnet X 9 will probably have to be explained to him.

In the puritan theology and its implications he cannot take much
interest, and will of course not be asked to do so. But high school
students of Milton will ordinarily, in their historical courses, have
come down to the times in which the poet lived, will understand his
relation to public events, and will appreciate his feeling toward the
English ecclesiastical system. Puritanism, a phenomenon of the most
tremendous importance at a certain period of English history, has so
completely disappeared from the modern world, that the utterances of a
seventeenth-century poet, professedly a partisan, on matters of church
and state, no longer exasperate, and can barely even interest, students
of literature.

To read either Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy we must find the poet's
cosmical and his theological standpoint. We have no right to be surprised
or shocked at his conceptions. We must take him as he is, and let him
lead us through the universe as he has pl