of its own. It is another example of that curiously topsy-turvy
condition of things in which rhyme was a mark of the classic, and blank
verse of the romantic. For Milton is the most truly classical of English
poets; and yet, from the angle of observation at which the eighteenth
century viewed him, he appeared a romantic. It was upon his romantic
side, at all events, that the new school of poets apprehended and
appropriated him.

This side was present in Milton in a fuller measure than his completed
works would show. It is well known that he, at one time, had projected
an Arthuriad, a design which, if carried out, might have anticipated
Tennyson and so deprived us of "The Idyls of the King." "I betook me,"
he writes, "among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn
cantos the deeds of knighthood."[1] And in the "Epitaphium Damonis" he
thus apprised the reader of his purpose:

"Ipse ego Dardanais Rutupina per aequora puppes,
Dicam, et Pandrasidos regnum vetus Inogeniae,
Brennumque Arviragunque duces, priscumque Belinum,
Et tandem Armoricos Britonum sub lege colonos;
Tum gravidam Arturo fatali fraude Ioergernen;
Mendaces vultus, assumptaque Gorloeis arma,
Merlini dolus."[2]

The "matter of Britain" never quite lost the fascination which it had
exercised over his youthful imagination, as appears from passages in
"Paradise Lost"[3] and even in "Paradise Regained."[4] But with his
increasing austerity, both religious and literary, Milton gravitated
finally to Hebraic themes and Hellenic art forms. He wrote Homeric epics
and Aeschylean tragedies, instead of masques and sonnets, of rhymed
pieces on the Italian model, like "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," and of
stanzaic poems, like the "Nativity Ode," touched with Elizabethan
conceits. He relied more and more upon sheer construction and weight of
thought and less upon decorative richness of detail. His diction became
naked and severe, and he employed rhyme but sparingly, even in the choral
parts of "Samson Agonistes." In short, like Goethe, he grew classical as
he grew old. It has been mentioned that "Paradise Lost" did much to keep
alive the tradition of English blank verse through a period remarkable
for its bigoted devotion to rhyme, and especially to the heroic couplet.
Yet it was, after all, Milton's early poetry, in which rhyme is
used--though used so differently from the way in which Pope used it--that
counted for