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All Milton's personal prejudices may be found in the Sonnets, from his hatred of those frightful Scotch appellations that would "make Quintlian gasp" to his longing for Classic companionship and "Attic wine" and "immortal notes" and "Tuscan airs"! As one reads on, laughing gently at the folly of those who have so misunderstood him, one is conscious more and more of that high, cold, clear, lonely tenderness, which found so little satisfaction in the sentiment of the rabble and still less in the endearments of women!
His Lucifer is no flickering, gentlemanly, philosophic man of the world like Goethe's Mephistopheles, nor like Milton's Fallen Cherub, whose "Form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appeared Less than archangel ruined, or excess Of glory obscured;"
They are monuments of our language so remarkable that Milton's prose works must always be resorted to by students, as long as English remains a medium of ideas. Yet even on the score of style, Milton's prose is subject to serious deductions. His negligence is such as to amount to an absence of construction.
The work takes its place in literature, obscuring the Arthurian work of Dryden, as Milton's achievement of Paradise Lost obscured the Italian work on the same subject which preceded it.
I rather think it has always been very much so, in bad as well as in good company; for you remember how Milton's fallen angels amused themselves with disputing on "providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate," and it was the same thing in that club Goldsmith writes so pleasantly about.
She became a church-member, zealous and earnest in the path of righteousness, partaking regularly of the Sacred Elements, visiting the sick, relieving the distressed, and comforting the afflicted. To use Milton's language, "Such a sacred and homefelt delight, Such sober certainty of waking bliss," she had never felt till then.
Thenceforward he rather effaces himself, and chiefly abstracts and summarises the "French Critic's" deliverances, laying special stress on the encomiums given to Milton's style. The piece is one of his most artfully constructed; and I do not anywhere know a better example of ingenious and attractive introduction of a friend, as we may call it, to a new society.
These and other such questions are suggested here not as necessarily fatal to Milton's doctrine: in fact, in certain countries, since Milton's time, the most thorough practical consideration of them has not impeded modifications of the Marriage Law in the direction heralded by Milton.
We remember Milton's noble explanation of these great words which may well silence our feeble attempts to enforce them 'Thy works and alms and all thy good endeavour Stood not behind, nor in the grave were trod, But as faith pointed with her golden rod, Followed them up to joy and bliss for ever.
I would wake and compose myself again, glad to be rid of the horrid dream, but again would she appear, with a hydra's tail, like Sin in Milton's Paradise Lost, wind herself round me, her beautiful face gradually changing into that of a skeleton. I cried out with terror, and awoke to sleep no more, and effectually cured by my dream of the penchant which I felt towards Miss Aramathea Judd.
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