Memory will always stink," were almost alone among the voices of their
time. They were still under the influence of the old political prejudice,
but they did battle for a doomed opinion, and, among judges not
illiterate, they are the poet's last detractors.

The singular thing to note is that the eighteenth century, which broke
with almost every other seventeenth-century poet before Dryden, did not
break with Milton. "Who now reads Cowley?" Pope asked: Cowley, whose works
ran through so many editions that no modern reprint has been called for.
If he had asked, "Who now reads Milton?" the answer must have been,
"Every writer of English verse"; and so it has continued from the time of
Milton's death to the present day. The choice of blank verse for
_Paradise Lost_ established that metre in formidable rivalry to the
heroic couplet, so that it became the usual metre for long poems of a
reflective or descriptive cast. Professed imitations of Milton's verse
were many; among them, Addison's _Translation of a Story out of the Third
Aeneid_, Broome's experiment in the translation of the Eleventh Odyssey,
Fenton's fragments of two books of the _Iliad_, and Christopher Pitt's
paraphrase of Psalm cxxxix. In the first year of the eighteenth century
John Philips showed, in his _Splendid Shilling_, how the style of Milton
might be applied, for the purposes of burlesque, to humble subjects, a
lesson which he further illustrated, with no ostensible comic intent, in
his later poems, _Cyder_ and _Blenheim_. Gay, in _Wine, a Poem_,
Somerville in _The Chase_, Armstrong in _The Oeconomy of Love_ and _The
Art of Preserving Health_, Christopher Smart in The Hop-Garden, Dyer in
_The Fleece_, and Grainger in _The Sugar-Cane_, all followed where
Philips' _Cyder_ had led, and multiplied year by year what may be called
the technical and industrial applications of Milton's style. Among the
many other blank verse poems produced during the middle part of the
century it is enough to name Thomson's _Seasons_; Blair's _Grave_;
Glover's _Leonidas_; Shenstone's _Economy_, _The Ruined Abbey_, and _Love
and Honour_; Young's _Night Thoughts_; Akenside's _Pleasures of the
Imagination_; Thomas Warton's _Pleasures of Melancholy_; Mallet's _The
Excursion_, and _Amyntor and Theodora_; Cooper's _The Power of Harmony_;
and Lyttelton's _Blenheim_. The influence of Milton is not equally
apparent in all of these, but in none is it wholly wanting; in most it is
visible