try dealing with lofty themes, so no critic had
ever been at the pains to refute that opinion. In the year of the
publication of _Paradise Lost_, Dryden delivered his judgment, that the
rhymed couplet was best suited for tragic passages in the drama, and that
blank verse should be employed chiefly for the lighter and more
colloquial purposes of comedy. Some echo of the courtly dispute then in
progress between Dryden and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard,
probably reached Milton's ear through his bookseller, Samuel Simmons; for
it was at the request of his bookseller that he added the three Miltonic
sentences on "The Verse," by way of preface. With his accustomed
confidence and directness of attack he begs the question in his first
words:--"The measure is English heroic verse without rime"; and in his
closing words he takes credit to himself for his "example set, the first
in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the
troublesome and modern bondage of riming."

In these two cardinal points, then--the matter and the form of his
poem--Milton was original. For the one there was no true precedent in
English; for the other there was no precedent that might not rather have
been called a warning. His matter was to be arranged and his verse
handled by his own ingenuity and at his own peril. He left a highroad
behind him, along which many a tuneful pauper has since limped; but
before him he found nothing but the jungle and false fires. In
considering his style, therefore, it is well to treat the problem as it
presented itself to him, and to follow his achievement as he won step by
step out of the void.

There were two great influences in English poetry, other than the drama,
when Milton began to write: the influence of Spenser and the influence of
Donne. Only the very slightest traces of either can be discerned in
Milton's early verse. There are some Spenserian cadences in the poem _On
the Death of a Fair Infant_, written in his seventeenth year:--

Or wert thou of the golden-winged host
Who, having clad thyself in human weed,
To earth from thy prefixed seat didst post,
And after short abode fly back with speed,
As if to show what creatures Heaven doth breed;
Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire
To scorn the sordid world, and unto Heaven aspire?

The later verses on _The Passion_, written in the same metre, are perhaps
the last in which Milton echoes Spenser, however faintly. Meanwh