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Alexander Henderson (search for this): chapter 4
Pindar nor Euripides ever wrote pamphlets against the Church of England, by G—! It won't do, Mr. Milton! This, it may be supposed, is Mr. Masson's way of being funny and dramatic at the same time. Good taste is shocked with this barbarous dissonance. Could not the Muse defend her son? Again, when Charles I., at Edinburgh, in the autumn and winter of 1641, fills the vacant English sees, we are told, It was more than an insult; it was a sarcasm! It was as if the King, while giving Alexander Henderson his hand to kiss, had winked his royal eye over that reverend Presbyter's back! Now one can conceive Charles II. winking when he took the Solemn League and Covenant, but never his father under any circumstances. He may have been, and I believe he was, a bad king, but surely we may take Marvell's word for it, that He nothing common did or mean, upon any of the memorable scenes of his life. The image is, therefore, out of all imaginative keeping, and vulgarizes the chief persona
Pindar (search for this): chapter 4
l leave the reader to judge by an example or two. In the manuscript copy of Milton's sonnet in which he claims for his own house the immunity which the memory of Pindar and Euripides secured for other walls, the title had originally been, On his Door when the City expected an Assault. Milton has drawn a line through this and sub the poet's study and finding some of his Anti-Episcopal pamphlets that had been left lying about inadvertently. Oho! the Cavalier Captain might then have said, Pindar and Euripides are all very well, by G—! I've been at college myself; and when I meet a gentleman and scholar, I hope I know how to treat him; but neither Pindar Pindar nor Euripides ever wrote pamphlets against the Church of England, by G—! It won't do, Mr. Milton! This, it may be supposed, is Mr. Masson's way of being funny and dramatic at the same time. Good taste is shocked with this barbarous dissonance. Could not the Muse defend her son? Again, when Charles I., at Edinburgh, in the autu
Walker (search for this): chapter 4
hou art so poor; I fan away the dust flying in mine eyes; Flowing o'er with court news only of you and them. All such participles (where no consonant divided the vowels) were normally of one syllable, permissibly of two. Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand with the versification to which Milton's youthful ear had been trained, but seems to have learned something from Abbott's Shakespearian Grammar in the interval between writing his notes and his Introduction. Walker's Shakespeare's Versification would have been a great help to him in default of original knowledge. If Mr. Masson had studied the poets who preceded Milton as he has studied him, he would never have said that the verse Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills, was peculiar as having a distinct syllable of over-measure. He retains Milton's spelling of hundred without perceiving the metrical reason for it, that d, t, p, b, &c., followed by l or r, might be either of two or of three syll
Hall (search for this): chapter 4
ls of what we must call the pseudo-dramatic kind. For example, does Hall profess to have traced Milton from the University to a suburb sink oasson fancies he hears Milton saying to himself, A suburb sink! has Hall or his son taken the trouble to walk all the way down to Aldersgate ne Yates had my doorstep tidy for the visit. Does Milton, answering Hall's innuendo that he was courting the graces of a rich widow, tell us them worse by misquoting and bringing love jinglingly near to grove. Hall's verse (in his Satires) is always vigorous and often harmonious He the very terms of the preface to Paradise Lost. of his opponent, Bishop Hall, Teach each hollow grove to sound his love, Wearying echo wi Surely it needed no great sensitiveness of ear to be set on edge by Hall's echo of teach each. Did Milton reject the h from Bashan and the res in which the sound occurs, as, for instance, those ending in tion. Hall, had he lived long enough, might have retorted on Milton his own
Bunyan (search for this): chapter 4
city of self-reliance, I suspect, which goes far toward making the sublime, and which, falling by a hair's-breadth short thereof, makes the ridiculous. Puritanism showed both the strength and weakness of its prophetic nurture; enough of the latter to be scoffed out of England by the very men it had conquered in the field, enough of the former to intrench itself in three or four immortal memories. It has left an abiding mark in politics and religion, but its great monuments are the prose of Bunyan and the verse of Milton. It is a high inspiration to be the neighbor of great events; to have been a partaker in them and to have seen noble purposes by their own self-confidence become the very means of ignoble ends, if it do not wholly depress, may kindle a passion of regret deepening the song which dares not tell the reason of its sorrow. The grand loneliness of Milton in his latter years, while it makes him the most impressive figure in our literary history, is reflected also in his ma
Marvell (search for this): chapter 4
harles I., at Edinburgh, in the autumn and winter of 1641, fills the vacant English sees, we are told, It was more than an insult; it was a sarcasm! It was as if the King, while giving Alexander Henderson his hand to kiss, had winked his royal eye over that reverend Presbyter's back! Now one can conceive Charles II. winking when he took the Solemn League and Covenant, but never his father under any circumstances. He may have been, and I believe he was, a bad king, but surely we may take Marvell's word for it, that He nothing common did or mean, upon any of the memorable scenes of his life. The image is, therefore, out of all imaginative keeping, and vulgarizes the chief personage in a grand historical tragedy, who, if not a great, was at least a decorous actor. But Mr. Masson can do worse than this. Speaking of a Mrs. Katherine Chidley, who wrote in defence of the Independents against Thomas Edwards, he says, People wondered who this she-Brownist, Katherine Chidley, was, an
Hakluyt (search for this): chapter 4
entleman who always used the contracted form of the participle in conversation, but always gave it back its embezzled syllable in reading. Sir Thomas Browne seems to have preferred the more solemn form. At any rate he has the spelling empuzzeled in prose. Indeed, I venture to affirm that there is not a single variety of spelling or accent to be found in Milton which is without example in his predecessors or contemporaries. Even highth, which is thought peculiarly Miltonic, is common (in Hakluyt, for example), and still often heard in New England. Mr. Masson gives an odd reason for Milton's preference of it as indicating more correctly the formation of the word by the addition of the suffix th to the adjective high. Is an adjective, then, at the base of growth, earth, birth, truth, and other words of this kind? Horne Tooke made a better guess than this. If Mr. Masson be right in supposing that a peculiar meaning is implied in the spelling bearth (Paradise Lost, IX. 624), which h
Chapman (search for this): chapter 4
where it serves to indicate that the pronunciation was not heroes as it had formerly been. That you may tell heroes, when you come To banquet with your wife. Chapman's Odyssey, VIII. 336, 337. In the facsimile of the sonnet to Fairfax I find Thy firm unshak'n vertue ever brings, which shows how much faith we need give to tside or motherside. Mr. Masson speaks of the Miltonic forms vanquisht, markt, lookt, etc. Surely he does not mean to imply that these are peculiar to Milton? Chapman used them before Milton was born, and pressed them farther, as in nak't and saf't for naked and saved. He often prefers the contracted form in his prose also, showing that the full form of the past participle in ed was passing out of fashion, though available in verse. Chapman's spelling is presumably his own. At least he looked after his printed texts. I have two copies of his Byron's Conspiracy, both dated 1608, but one evidently printed later than the other, for it shows corrections.
Lycidas (search for this): chapter 4
great in these passages of civic grandeur; but he is more surprising, on the whole, where he has an image to deal with. Speaking of Milton's two-handed engine in Lycidas, he says: May not Milton, whatever else he meant, have meant a coming English Parliament with its two Houses? Whatever he meant, his prophecy had come true. As , but he also showed from the first that larger style which was to be his peculiar distinction. The strain heard in the Nativity Ode, in the Solemn Music, and in Lycidas, is of a higher mood, as regards metrical construction, than anything that had thrilled the English ear before, giving no uncertain augury of him who was to show me widewatered shore, or where he fancies the shores There seems to be something wrong in this word shores. Did Milton write shoals? and sounding seas washing Lycidas far away; but it reaches its climax in the Paradise Lost. He produces his effects by dilating our imaginations with an impalpable hint rather than by concentrati
Jane Yates (search for this): chapter 4
s premier coup d'oeil by impertinent details of what we must call the pseudo-dramatic kind. For example, does Hall profess to have traced Milton from the University to a suburb sink of London? Mr. Masson fancies he hears Milton saying to himself, A suburb sink! has Hall or his son taken the trouble to walk all the way down to Aldersgate here, to peep up the entry where I live, and so have an exact notion of my whereabouts? There has been plague in the neighborhood certainly; and I hope Jane Yates had my doorstep tidy for the visit. Does Milton, answering Hall's innuendo that he was courting the graces of a rich widow, tell us that he would rather choose a virgin of mean fortunes honestly bred Mr. Masson forthwith breaks forth in a paroxysm of what we suppose to be picturesqueness in this wise: What have we here? Surely nothing less, if we choose so to construe it, than a marriage advertisement! Ho, all ye virgins of England (widows need not apply), here is an opportunity such a
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