, Tennyson's mawkishness, find no counterpart in Milton's
early compositions. All these great writers, though the span of some of
them was but short, lived long enough to blush for much of what they had
in the days of their ignorance taken for poetry. The mature Milton had
no cause to be ashamed of anything written by the immature Milton,
reasonable allowance being made for the inevitable infection of
contemporary false taste. As a general rule, the youthful exuberance of
a Shakespeare would be a better sign; faults, no less than beauties,
often indicate the richness of the soil. But Milton was born to confute
established opinions. Among other divergencies from usage, he was at
this time a rare example of an English poet whose faculty was, in large
measure, to be estimated by his essays in Latin verse. England had up to
this time produced no distinguished Latin poet, though Scotland had:
and had Milton's Latin poems been accessible, they would certainly have
occupied a larger place in the estimation of his contemporaries than his
English compositions. Even now they contribute no trifling addition to
his fame, though they cannot, even as exercises, be placed in the
highest rank. There are two roads to excellence in Latin verse--to write
it as a scholar, or to write it as a Roman. England has once, and only
once, produced a poet so entirely imbued with the Roman spirit that
Latin seemed to come to him like the language of some prior state of
existence, rather remembered than learned. Landor's Latin verse is hence
greatly superior to Milton's, not, perhaps, in scholarly elegance, but
in absolute vitality. It would be poor praise to commend it for fidelity
to the antique, for it is the antique. Milton stands at the head of the
numerous class who, not being actually born Romans, have all but made
themselves so. "With a great sum obtained I this freedom." His Latin
compositions are delightful, but precisely from the qualities least
characteristic of his genius as an English poet. Sublimity and
imagination are infrequent; what we have most commonly to admire are
grace, ease, polish, and felicitous phrases rather concise in expression
than weighty with matter. Of these merits the elegies to his friend
Diodati, and the lines addressed to his father and to Manso, are
admirable examples. The "Epitaphium Damonis" is in a higher strain, and
we shall have to recur to it.

Except for his formal incorporation with the University of Oxfo