foolish
frigate of his unseasonable authorities." His best folios "are
predestined to no better end than to make winding-sheets in Lent for
pilchers." With this last stroke Milton is so well pleased that he
repeats the same prediction in an elaborated form over the works of
Salmasius, and even celebrates in numerous verse the forethought and
bounty of one who has thus taken pity on the nakedness of fishes.

The fantastic nature of these quips and taunts reminds us that Milton
belonged to the age of the metaphysical poets and satirists, the age of
Cowley, and Cleveland, and Butler. His prose works have been searched
chiefly for passages that may be used to illustrate his poetry; and
although the search has been rewarded with many natural coincidences of
expression, not a few passages of lofty self-confidence, and some
raptures of poetic metaphor, the result has been in the main a
disappointment. His admirers, too jealous for the poetic dignity of their
hero, have turned away sorrowfully from this memorial heap of odd-shaped
missiles, hurled from his dire left hand for the confusion of his
enemies. And yet, rightly judged, there is instruction, and an increased
reverence for the poet, to be found in these also--in all that wild array
of subjects and methods which he commands for the purposes of his prose,
but dismisses from the service of his verse. It was a strict and rare
selection that he made among the auxiliaries when he addressed himself to
the more arduous attempt. Here and there, even in _Paradise Lost_, his
education in the handling of satire and invective stood him in stead. The
poem contains more than one "flyting"--to use the Scottish term--and the
high war of words between Satan and Abdiel in heaven, or between Satan
and Gabriel on earth, could not have been handled save by a master of all
the weapons of verbal fence and all the devices of wounding invective. In
the great close of the Fourth Book, especially, where the arch-fiend and
the archangel retaliate defiance, and tower, in swift alternate flights,
to higher and higher pitches of exultant scorn, Milton puts forth all his
strength, and brings into action a whole armoury of sarcasm and insult
whetted and polished from its earlier prosaic exercise. Even the
grotesque element in his humour is not wholly excluded from the _Paradise
Lost_; it has full scope, for once, in the episodical description of the
Paradise of Fools--that barren continent, beaten on by