No English poet can compare
with him in majesty or completeness.

An adequate study of his achievement is impossible within the limits of
the few pages that are all a book like this can spare to a single
author. Readers who desire it will find it in the work of his two best
critics, Mark Pattison and Sir Walter Raleigh.[4] All that can be done
here is to call attention to some of his most striking qualities.
Foremost, of course, is the temper of the man. From the beginning he
was sure of himself and sure of his mission; he had his purpose plain
and clear. There is no mental development, hardly, visible in his work,
only training, undertaken anxiously and prayerfully and with a clearly
conceived end. He designed to write a masterpiece and he would not start
till he was ready. The first twenty years of his life were spent in
assiduous reading; for twenty more he was immersed in the dust and toil
of political conflict, using his pen and his extraordinary equipment of
learning and eloquence to defend the cause of liberty, civil and
religious, and to attack its enemies; not till he was past middle age
had he reached the leisure and the preparedness necessary to accomplish
his self-imposed work. But all the time, as we know, he had it in his
mind. In _Lycidas_, written in his Cambridge days, he apologizes to his
readers for plucking the fruit of his poetry before it is ripe. In
passage after passage in his prose works he begs for his reader's
patience for a little while longer till his preparation be complete.
When the time came at last for beginning he was in no doubt; in his very
opening lines he intends, he says, to soar no "middle flight." This
self-assured unrelenting certainty of his, carried into his prose essays
in argument, produces sometimes strange results. One is peculiarly
interesting to us now in view of current controversy. He was unhappily
married, and because he was unhappy the law of divorce must be changed.
A modern--George Eliot for instance--would have pleaded the artistic
temperament and been content to remain outside the law. Milton always
argued from himself to mankind at large.

[Footnote 4: "Milton," E.M.L., and "Milton" (Edward Arnold).]

In everything he did, he put forth all his strength. Each of his poems,
long or short, is by itself a perfect whole, wrought complete. The
reader always must feel that the planning of each is the work of
conscious, deliberate, and selecting art. Milton never digr