blank verse of the next century, especially in its two chief
examples, Thomson and Young,--great verse-smiths both of them,--to observe
his superiority in art. These two, especially Thomson, try the
verse-paragraph system, but they do it ostentatiously and clumsily.
Thomson's trick of ending such paragraphs with such lines as "And Thule
bellows through her utmost isles," often repeated with only verbal
substitutions, is apt to make the reader think with a smile of the breath
of relief which a man draws after a serious effort. "Thank heaven that
paragraph's done!" the poet seems to be saying. Nothing of the kind is ever
to be found in Milton. It is only on examination that the completeness of
these divisions is perceived. They are linked one to another with the same
incomparably artful concealment of art which links their several and
internal clauses. And thus it is that Milton is able to carry his readers
through (taking both poems together) sixteen books of epic, without much
narrative interest, with foregone conclusions, with long passages which are
merely versifications of well-known themes, and with others which the most
favourable critics admit to be, if not exactly dull, yet certainly not
lively. Something the same may be said of _Samson_, though here a decided
stiffening and mannerising of the verse is to some extent compensated by
the pathetic and human interest of the story. It is to be observed,
however, that Milton has here abused the redundant syllable (the chief
purely poetical mistake of which he has been guilty in any part of his
work, and which is partly noticeable in _Comus_), and that his choric odes
are but dry sticks in comparison with _Lycidas_.

It may be thought strange that I should say little or nothing of the
subject of these immortal poems. But, in the first place, those critics of
poetry who tell us that "all depends on the subject" seem to forget that,
according to this singular dictum, there is no difference between poetry
and prose--between an epic and a blue-book. I prefer--having been brought
up at the feet of Logic--to stick to the genus and differentia of poetry,
and not to its accidents. Moreover, the matter of _Paradise Lost_ and its
sequel is so universally known that it becomes unnecessary, and has been so
much discussed that it seems superfluous, to rediscuss it. The inquiries
into Milton's indebtedness to forerunners strike me as among the idlest
inquiries of the kind--which is sa