Denied the wild wit-combats of the Mermaid, he disported himself
in a pamphlet-war on bishops and divorce. But he found health and
exercise for his faculties there; and the moral (for all things have a
moral) is this: that when, in a mood of self-indulgence, we can write
habitually with the gust, the licentious force, the flow, and the
careless wealthy insolence of the _Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's
Defence against Smectymnuus_, we need not then repine or be ill-content
if we find that we can rise only occasionally to the chastity, the
severity, and the girded majesty of _Paradise Lost_.

CHAPTER VI
THE STYLE OF MILTON; AND ITS INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH POETRY

When Milton was born, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Dekker, Chapman,
Daniel, Drayton, and half a hundred other Elizabethan notables were yet
alive. When he died, Addison, Swift, Steele, and Arbuthnot were already
born. Thus his life bridges the gulf between the age of Elizabeth and the
age of Anne; and this further examination of his style has for object to
inquire what part he may claim in the change of temper, method, subject,
and form which came over English poetry during that period.

The answer usually given to this question is that he had no part at all.
He lived and died alone. He imitated no one, and founded no school. There
was none of his more distinguished contemporaries with whom he was on
terms of intimacy; none whose ideals in poetry remotely resembled his. So
that although he is to be ranged among the greatest of English poets, a
place in the legitimate hereditary succession would, on these
considerations, be denied to him. When Dryden succeeded to the
dictatorship of Jonson, the continuity of literary history was resumed.
The great processes of change which affected English letters during the
seventeenth century are in no way associated with the name of Milton.
Waller and Denham, Davenant and Dryden, "reformed" English verse; Hobbes,
Cowley, Tillotson, Dryden and Sprat remodelled English prose. And in the
meantime, if this account is to be accepted, while English verse and
English prose were in the melting-pot, this splendid efflorescence was an
accident, a by-product, without meaning or causal virtue in the chemical
process that was going forward.

Others will have it that Milton was a belated Elizabethan. But the
difficulty of that theory is that he reversed rather than continued many
of the practices of the Elizabethans, and intr