lian poems were the
admiration of the Tuscan scholars. But his learning appears in his
poetry only in the form of a fine and chastened result, and not in
laborious allusion and pedantic citation, as too often in Ben Jonson,
for instance. "My father," he wrote, "destined me, while yet a little
child, for the study of humane letters." He was also destined for the
ministry, but, "coming to some maturity of years and perceiving what
tyrany had invaded the Church,...I thought it better to prefer a
blameless silence, before the sacred office of speaking, bought and
begun with servitude and forswearing." Other hands than a bishop's were
laid upon his head. "He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write
well hereafter," he says, "ought himself to be a true poem." And he adds
that his "natural haughtiness" saved him from all impurity of living.
Milton had a sublime self-respect. The dignity and earnestness of the
Puritan gentleman blended in his training with the culture of the
Renaissance. Born into an age of spiritual conflict, he dedicated his
gift to the service of Heaven, and he became, like Heine, a valiant
soldier in the war for liberation. He was the poet of a cause, and his
song was keyed to

the Dorian mood
Of flutes and soft recorders such as raised
To height of noblest temper, heroes old
Arming to battle.

On comparing Milton with Shakspere, with his universal sympathies and
receptive imagination, one perceives a loss in breadth, but a gain in
intense personal conviction. He introduced a new note into English
poetry: the passion for truth and the feeling of religious sublimity.
Milton's was an heroic age, and its song must be lyric rather than
dramatic; its singer must be in the fight and of it.

Of the verses which he wrote at Cambridge the most important was his
splendid ode _On the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. At Horton he wrote,
among other things, the companion pieces, _L'Allegro_ and _Il
Penseroso_, of a kind quite new in English, giving to the landscape an
expression in harmony with the two contrasted moods. _Comus_, which
belongs to the same period, was the perfection of the Elizabethan court
masque, and was presented at Ludlow Castle in 1634, on the occasion of
the installation of the Earl of Bridgewater as Lord President of Wales.
Under the guise of a skillful addition to the Homeric allegory of Circe,
with her cup of enchantment, it was a Puritan song in prais