work. But since style is the expression of a living organism, not a
problem of cunning tesselation, it is permissible, in this place, to pass
over what he borrowed from the ancients, in order to deal with a more
intimate matter, and to attempt a valuation of that which he borrowed
from no one, either ancient or modern.

His indomitable personality and irrepressible originality have left their
stamp on all his work, and have moulded his treatment, his handling, his
diction, his style. We, who have been inured for centuries to Miltonic
mouthings and mannerisms, are too likely to underestimate the degree of
his originality. Coleridge was probably wrong when he said that
"Shakespeare's poetry is characterless; that is, it does not reflect the
individual Shakespeare." But he was unquestionably right when he added
that "John Milton himself is in every line of _Paradise Lost_." The more
they are studied, the more do Milton's life and his art seem to cohere,
and to express the pride and the power of his character.

Consider first his choice of subject. Ever since the Renaissance had
swept modern poetry back to the pagan world, some voices of protest had
been raised, some swimmers, rather bold than strong, had attempted to
stem the tide. Among the earliest of these was Thomas Sternhold, Groom of
the Chamber to King Henry the Eighth. Inspired perhaps by the example of
a better poet, Clement Marot, Sternhold thrust some of the Psalms of
David into a carterly metre, "thinking thereby," says Anthony a Wood, in
his delightfully colloquial fashion, "that the courtiers would sing them
instead of their sonnets, but did not, only some few excepted." In the
reign of Elizabeth, when the classical mythology reigned and revelled in
pageant and masque, in court and town, one Thomas Brice, a painful
preacher, cried out against the pagan fancies that had caught the English
imagination captive:--

We are not Ethnickes, we forsoth at least professe not so;
Why range we then to Ethnickes' trade? Come back, where will ye go?
Tel me, is Christe or Cupide lord? Doth God or Venus reign?

But he cried to deaf ears, and the Elizabethan age produced no body of
sacred poetry worth a record. The beautiful metrical version of the
Psalms, made by Sir Philip Sidney and his sister, remained in manuscript
for centuries. Drayton's _Harmonie of the Church_ was suppressed. Robert
Southwell, whose lyrics on sacred subjects give him a unique place among
the