copies
of Euripides, Pindar, Aratus, and Lycophron, are, or have been recently,
extant, with marginal notes, proving that he weighed what he read. A
commonplace book contains copious extracts from historians, and he tells
Diodati that he has read Greek history to the fall of Constantinople. He
speaks of having occasionally repaired to London for instruction in
mathematics and music. His own programme, promulgated eight years later,
but without doubt perfectly appropriate to his Horton period, names
before all else--"Devout prayer to the Holy Spirit, that can enrich with
all utterance and knowledge, and send out His Seraphim with the hallowed
fire of His altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom He pleases. To
this must be added select reading, steady observation, and insight into
all seemly and generous arts and affairs, till which in some measure be
compassed, I refuse not to sustain this expectation." This is not the
ideal of a mere scholar, as Mark Paulson thinks he at one time was, and
would wish him to have remained. "Affairs" are placed fully on a level
with "arts." Milton was kept from politics in his youth, not by any
notion of their incompatibility with poetry; but by the more cogent
arguments at their command "under whose inquisitious and tyrannical
duncery no free and splendid wit can flourish."

Milton's poetical development is, in many respects, exceptional. Most
poets would no doubt, in theory, agree with Landor, "febriculis non
indicari vires, impatientiam ab ignorantia non differre," but their
faith will not be proved by lack of works, as Landor's precept and
example require. He, who like Milton lisps in numbers usually sings
freely in adolescence; he who is really visited by a true inspiration
generally depends on mood rather than on circumstance. Milton, on the
other hand, until fairly embarked on his great epic, was comparatively
an unproductive, and literally an occasional poet. Most of his pieces,
whether English or Latin, owe their existence to some impulse from
without: "Comus" to the solicitation of a patron, "Lycidas" to the death
of a friend. The "Allegro" and the "Penseroso" seem almost the only two
written at the urgency of an internal impulse; and perhaps, if we knew
their history, we should discover that they too were prompted by
extraneous suggestion or provoked into being by accident. Such is the
way with Court poets like Dryden and Claudian; it is unlike the usual
procedure of Milton'