orge Peele; and when he set himself to write a masque he was doubtless
well acquainted with the works of the chief master in that kind, Ben
Jonson. William Godwin, in his _Lives of Edward and John Phillips_,
expresses the opinion that Milton studied the works of Jonson more
assiduously than those of any other Elizabethan. The specific evidence
that he cites--a few passages of possible reminiscence--is not
convincing. He has no more striking coincidence to show than the
resemblance between a phrase in _Il Penseroso_:--

Come, but keep thy wonted state

and two lines of Jonson's _Hymn to Cynthia_:--

Seated in thy silver chair
State in wonted manner keep.

If the original genius of a poet is to be sworn away at this rate, there
will soon come a time when no man is secure. Both words are common in
Elizabethan English; if their occurrence in a single line is to warrant a
charge of plagiarism, the next step will be to make them Jonson's
property, and to forbid the use of either to all but the tribe of Ben.
Milton doubtless studied Jonson's works; and, if specific resemblances
are both weighed and counted, a good case can be made out for the
influence of Jonson's prose on the author of the _Areopagitica_. But the
fact is that criticism finds itself here in a region where this minute
matching of phrase with phrase is useless or misleading. Milton's early
poems grew on Elizabethan soil, and drank Elizabethan air. It matters
little that there are few verbal coincidences; the influence is
omnipresent, easy to feel, impossible to describe in detail. From whom
but the Elizabethans could he have learned to write thus?--

Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race:
Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours,
Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace;
And glut thyself with what thy womb devours.

The Elizabethan style is not to be mistaken, the high-figured phrases,
loosely welded together, lulling the imagination into acquiescence by the
flow of the melody. Lines like these might well occur in _Richard II_.
The same Shakespearian note is clearly audible in such a passage as this,
where Comus describes the two brothers:--

Their port was more than human, as they stood.
I took it for a faery vision
Of some gay creatures of the element,
That in the colours of the rainbow live,
And play i' the plighted clouds. I was awe-strook,
And, as I passed, I worshipped. If those you seek,
It were a journey li