ce handbooks of
literature are commonly formed by a process of attrition from such works
as Johnson's _Lives_, his opinions on a point like this persist in
epidemic fashion; they are detached from their authority, and repeated so
often that at last they become orthodox. But no ignoring of Milton can
alter the fact that English verse went Milton-mad during the earlier half
of the eighteenth century. Miltonic cadences became a kind of patter, and
the diction that Milton had invented for the rendering of his colossal
imaginations was applied indifferently to all subjects--to apple-growing,
sugar-boiling, the drainage of the Bedford level, the breeding of
negroes, and the distempers of sheep. Milton's shadowy grandeur, his
avoidance of plain concrete terms, his manner of linking adjective with
substantive, were all necessary to him for the describing of his strange
world; but these habits became a mere vicious trick of absurd periphrasis
and purposeless vagueness when they were carried by his imitators into
the description of common and familiar objects. A reader making his first
acquaintance with Thomson's _Seasons_ might suppose that the poem was
written for a wager, to prove that country life may be described, and
nothing called by its name. The philosophic pride of the eighteenth
century was tickled by the use of general terms in description; the
chosen periphrases are always more comprehensive than the names that they
replace. When Thomson, for instance, speaks of "the feathered nations" or
of "the glossy kind," it is only by the context that we are saved from
supposing him to allude, in the one case to Red Indians, in the other to
moles. And these are but two of some dozen devices for escaping from the
flat vulgarity of calling birds by that name.

Milton himself, it must be admitted, is not wholly free from blame. The
elevation and vagueness of his diction, which were a mere necessity to
him in the treatment of large parts of his subject, are yet maintained by
him in the description of things comparatively familiar. When Sin is
described as "rolling her bestial train" towards the gates of Hell, the
diction is faultless; when the serpent (as yet an innocent reptile in
Paradise),

Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine
His braided train,

it is impossible to cavil; but when Raphael, in conversation with Adam,
describes the formation of the banks--

where rivers now
Stream, and perpetual dra