w forcible,
which in short clauses and "jewels five words long" occurs constantly, even
in the passages least artistically finished as wholes. There is no English
prose author whose prose is so constantly racy with such a distinct and
varied savour as Milton's. It is hardly possible to open him anywhere after
the fashion of the _Sortes Virgilianae_ without lighting on a line or a
couple of lines, which for the special purpose it is impossible to improve.
And it might be contended with some plausibility that this abundance of
jewels, or purple patches, brings into rather unfair prominence the slips
of grammar and taste, the inequalities of thought, the deplorable attempts
to be funny, the rude outbursts of bargee invective, which also occur so
numerously. One other peculiarity, or rather one result of these
peculiarities, remains to be noticed; and that is that Milton's prose is
essentially inimitable. It would be difficult even to caricature or to
parody it; and to imitate it as his verse, at least his later verse, has
been so often imitated, is simply impossible.

The third and, in popular estimation, the most important period of Milton's
production was again poetical. The characteristics of the poetry of the
three great works which illustrate it are admittedly uniform, though in
_Samson Agonistes_ they exhibit themselves in a harder, drier, more
ossified form than in the two great epics. This relation is only a
repetition of the relation between _Paradise Lost_ and _Paradise Regained_
themselves on the one hand, and the poems of twenty years earlier,
especially _Comus_ and _Lycidas_, on the other. The wonderful Miltonic
style, so artificial and yet such a triumph of art, is evident even so
early as the ode on the "Nativity," and it merely developed its own
characteristics up to the _Samson_ of forty years later. That it is a real
style and not merely a trick, like so many others, is best shown by the
fact that it is very hard, if not impossible, to analyse it finally into
elements. The common opinion charges Milton with Latinising heavily; and so
he does. But we open _Paradise Lost_ at random, and we find a dozen lines,
and not the least beautiful (the Third Day of Creation), without a word in
them that is not perfectly simple English, or if of Latin origin,
naturalised long before Milton's time, while the syntax is also quite
vernacular. Again it is commonly thought that the habits of antithesis and
parallelism, of om