ned_ and in _Samson
Agonistes_, Milton retained his system of blank verse in its general
characteristics, but he treated it with increased dryness and with a
certain harshness of effect. It is certainly in his biblical drama that
blank verse has been pushed to its most artificial and technical
perfection, and it is there that Milton's theories are to be studied
best; yet it must be confessed that learning excludes beauty in some of
the very audacious irregularities which he here permits himself in
_Samson Agonistes_. Such lines as

"Made arms ridiculous, useless the forgery--
My griefs not only pain me as a lingering disease--
Drunk with idolatry, drunk with wine--
Justly, yet despair not of his final pardon"--

are constructed with perfect comprehension of metrical law, yet they
differ so much from the normal structure of blank verse that they need
to be explained, and to imitate them would be perilous. A persistent
weakness in the third foot has ever been the snare of English blank
verse, and it is this element of monotony and dulness which Milton is
ceaselessly endeavouring to obviate by his wonderful inversions,
elisions and breaks.

After the Restoration, and after a brief period of experiment with
rhymed plays, the dramatists returned to the use of blank verse, and in
the hands of Otway, Lee and Dryden, it recovered much of its
magnificence. In the 18th century, Thomson and others made use of a very
regular and somewhat monotonous form of blank verse for descriptive and
didactic poems, of which the _Night Thoughts_ of Young is, from a
metrical point of view, the most interesting. With these poets the form
is little open to licence, while inversions and breaks are avoided as
much as possible. Since the 18th century, blank verse has been subjected
to constant revision in the hands of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley,
Keats, Tennyson, the Brownings and Swinburne, but no radical changes, of
a nature unknown to Shakespeare and Milton, have been introduced into
it.

See J.A. Symonds, _Blank Verse_ (1895); Walter Thomas, _Le Decasyllabe
romain et sa fortune en Europe_ (1904); Robert Bridges _Milton's
Prosody_ (1894); Ed. Guest, _A History of English Rhythms_ (1882); J.
Mothere, _Les Theories du vers hereoique anglais_ (1886); J. Schipper,
_Englische Metrik_ (1881-1888). (E. G.)

BLANQUI, JEROME ADOLPHE (1798-1854), French economist, was born at Nice
on the 21st of November 1798. Beginn