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passing out of fashion, though available in verse.* Indeed, I venture to affirm that there is not a single variety of spelling or accent to be found in Milton which is without example in his predecessors or contemporaries. Even highth, which is thought peculiarly Miltonic, is common (in Hakluyt, for example), and still often heard in New England. Mr. Masson gives an odd reason for Milton's preference of it, "as indicating more correctly the formation of the word by the addition of the suffix th to the adjective high.” Is an adjective, then, at the base of growth, earth, birth, truth, and other words of this kind? Horne Tooke made a better guess than this. If Mr. Masson be right in supposing that a peculiar meaning is implied in the spelling bearth ("Paradise Lost," ix., 624), which he interprets as "collective produce," though in the only other instance where it occurs it is neither more nor less than birth, it should seem that Milton had hit upon Horne Tooke's etymology. But it is really solemn trifling to lay any stress on the spelling of the original editions, after having admitted, as Mr. Masson has honestly done, that in all likelihood Milton had nothing to do with it. And yet he cannot refrain. On the word voutsafe he hangs nearly a page of dissertation on the nicety of Milton's Mr. Masson thinks that Milton "must have had a reason for it," and finds that reason in “his dislike to [of] the sound

ear.

* Chapman's spelling is presumably his own. At least he looked after his printed texts. I have two copies of his Byron's Conspiracy, both dated 1608, but one evidently printed later than the other, for it shows corrections. The more soleinn ending in ed was probably kept alive by the reading of the Bible in churches. Though now dropped by the clergy, it is essential to the right hearing of the more metrical passages in the Old Testament, which are finer and more scientific than anything in the language, unless it be some parts of "Samson Agonistes." I remember an old gentleman who always used the contracted form of the participle in conversation, but always gave it back its embezzled syllable of reading. Sir Thomas Browne seems to have preferred the more solemn form. At any rate he has the spelling empuzzeled in prose.

He thinks the same of the variation strook and struck, though they were probably pronounced alike. In Marlowe's "Faustus" two consecutive sentences (in prose) begin with the words "Cursed be he that struck." In

ch, or to [of] that sound combined with s.

His fine ear

taught him not only to seek for musical effects and cadences at large, but also to be fastidious as to syllables, and to avoid harsh or difficult conjunctions of consonants, except when there might be a musical reason for harshness or difficulty. In the management of the letter s, the frequency of which in English is one of the faults of the speech, he will be found, I believe, most careful and skilful. More rarely, I think, than in Shakespeare will one word ending in s be found followed immediately in Milton by another word beginning with the same letter; or, if he does occasionally pen such a phrase as Moab's sons, it will be difficult to find in him, I believe, such a harsher example as earth's substance, of which many writers would think nothing. [With the index to back him Mr. Masson could safely say this.] The same delicacy of ear is even more apparent in his management of the sh sound. He has it often, of course; but it may be noted that he rejects it in his verse when he can. He writes Basan for Bashan, Sittim for Shittim, Silo for Shiloh, Asdod for Ashdod. Still more, however, does he seem to have been wary of the compound sound ch as in church. Of his sensitiveness to this sound in excess there is a curious proof in his prose pamphlet, entitled 'An Apology against a Pamphlet, called A Modest Completion, etc.,' where, having occasion to quote these lines from one of the Satires of his opponent, Bishop Hall,

'Teach each hollow grove to sound his love, Wearying echo with one changeless word,'

he adds, ironically, And so he well might, and all his auditory besides, with his teach each!'" Generalisations are always

a note on the passage Mr. Dyce tells us that the old editions (there were three) have stroke and strooke in the first instance, and all agree on strucke in the second. No inference can be drawn from such casualties.

The lines are not "from one of the Satires," and Milton made them worse by misquoting and bringing love jinglingly near to grove. Hall's verse (in his Satires) is always vigorous and often harmonious. He long before Milton spoke of rhyme almost in the very terms of the preface to "Paradise Lost."

risky, but when extemporised from a single hint they are maliciously so. Surely it needed no great sensitiveness of ear to be set on edge by Hall's echo of teach each. Did Milton reject the h from Bashan and the rest because he disliked the sound of sh, or because he had found it already rejected by the Vulgate and by some of the earlier translators of the Bible into English? Oddily enough, Milton uses words beginning with sh seven hundred and fifty-four times in his poetry, not to speak of others in which the sound occurs, as, for instance, those ending in tion. Hall, had he lived long enough, might have retorted on Milton his own

or his

"Manliest, resolutest, breast,

As the magnetick hardest iron draws,"

"What moves thy inquisition? Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall, And my promotion thy destruction?"

With the playful controversial wit of the day he would have hinted that too much est-est is as fatal to a blank-verse as to a bishop, and that danger was often incurred by those who too eagerly shunned it. Nay, he might even have found an echo almost tallying with his own in

"To begirt the almighty throne

Beseeching or besieging,"

a pun worthy of Milton's worst prose. Or he might have twitted him with "a sequent king who seeks." As for the sh sound, a poet could hardly have found it ungracious to his ear who wrote,

66

Gnashing for anguish and despite and shame,"

or again,

"Then bursting forth

Afresh with conscious terrors vex me round

That rest or intermission none I find.

Before mine eyes in opposition sits
Grim Death, my son."

And if Milton disliked the ch sound, he gave his ears unnecessary pain by verses such as these

"Straight couches close; then, rising, changes oft

His couchant watch, as one who chose his ground;"

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still more by such a juxtaposition as matchless chief."*

The truth is, that Milton was a harmonist rather than a melodist. There are, no doubt, some exquisite melodies (like "Sabrina Fair") among his earlier poems, as could hardly fail to be the case in an age which produced or trained the authors of our best English glees, as ravishing in their instinctive felicity as the songs of our dramatists, but he also showed from the first that larger style which was to be his peculiar distinction. The strain heard in the "Nativity Ode," in the "Solemn Music," and in "Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as regards metrical construction, than anything that had thrilled the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay silent till he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevailing breath. It was in the larger movements of metre that Milton was great and original. I have spoken elsewhere of Spenser's fondness for dilatation as respects thoughts and images. In Milton it extends to the language also, and often to the

Mr. Masson goes so far as to Jonceive it possible that Milton may have committed the vulgarism of leaving a t out of lep'st, "for ease of sound.” Yet the poet could bear boast'st and-one stares and gasps at it-doat'dst. There is, by the way, a familiar passage in which the ch sound predominates, not without a touch of sh, in a single couplet :

"Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould
Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment?"

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single words of which a period is composed. He loved phrases of towering port, in which every member dilated stands like Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and passages that stamp him great, the verses do not dance interweaving to soft Lydian airs, but march rather with resounding tread and clang of martial music. It is true that he is cunning in alliterations, so scattering them that they tell in his orchestra without being obvious, but it is in the more scientific region of open-voweled assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet withhold it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them), that he is an artist and a master. He even sometimes introduces rhyme with misleading intervals between and unobviously in his blank-verse :

"There rest, if any rest can harbour there;
And, reassembling our afflicted powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity,

What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not, what resolution from despair."*

There is one almost perfect quatrain

"Before thy fellows, ambitious to win

From me some plume, that thy success may show
Destruction to the rest. This pause between
(Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know;"

and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an assonance

"If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge

Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft

In worst extremes and on the perilous edge
Of battle when it raged, in all assaults."

* I think Coleridge's nice ear would have blamed the nearness of enemy and calamity in this passage. Mr. Masson leaves out the comma after If not, the pause of which is needful, I think, to the sense, and certainly to keep not a little farther apart from what ("teach each!").

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