ult
to write without fear or favour, but it must be attempted.

Milton's periods of literary production were three. In each of them he
produced work of the highest literary merit, but at the same time
singularly different in kind. In the first, covering the first thirty years
of his life, he wrote no prose worth speaking of, but after juvenile
efforts, and besides much Latin poetry of merit, produced the exquisite
poems of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, the _Hymn on the Nativity_, the
incomparable _Lycidas_, the _Comus_ (which I have the audacity to think his
greatest work, if scale and merit are considered), and the delicious
fragments of the _Arcades_. Then his style abruptly changed, and for
another twenty years he devoted himself chiefly to polemical pamphlets,
relieved only by a few sonnets, whose strong originality and intensely
personal savour are uniform, while their poetical merit varies greatly. The
third period of fifteen years saw the composition of the great epics of
_Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_, and of the tragedy of _Samson
Agonistes_, together with at least the completion of a good deal of prose,
including a curious _History of England_, wherein Milton expatiates with a
singular gusto over details which he must have known, and indeed allows
that he knew, to be fabulous. The production of each of these periods may
be advantageously dealt with separately and in order.

Milton's Latin compositions both in prose and verse lie rather outside of
our scope, though they afford a very interesting subject. It is perhaps
sufficient to say that critics of such different times, tempers, and
attitudes towards their subject as Johnson and the late Rector of
Lincoln,--critics who agree in nothing except literary competence,--are
practically at one as to the remarkable excellence of Milton's Latin verse
at its best. It is little read now, but it is a pity that any one who can
read Latin should allow himself to be ignorant of at least the beautiful
_Epitaphium Damonis_ on the poet's friend, Charles Diodati.

The dates of the few but exquisite poems of the first period are known with
some but not complete exactness. Milton was not an extremely precocious
poet, and such early exercises as he has preserved deserve the description
of being rather meritorious than remarkable. But in 1629, his year of
discretion, he struck his own note first and firmly with the hymn on the
"Nativity." Two years later the beautiful