Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/201

Rh The strength of individuality which marks Milton's work from the very first makes the traces in it of contemporary influence appear superficial, interesting as they are to the literary student. His youthful versions of the Psalms contain reminiscences of his reading in Sylvester, Spenser, Drummond, and other poets who enjoyed Puritan approval, but the rich embroidery of "Let us with a gladsome mind" is already characteristic. The verses On the Death of a Fair Infant are a charmingly executed, elegant conceit of the kind Jonson elaborates in some of his eulogies, as the second epigram to Mary Lady Wroth or the immediately preceding one to Susan, Countess of Montgomery; while the verse, the "Troilus" stanza with a closing Alexandrine, is Spenserian. Milton's early work is not untouched with the frost of conceit, but it is never scholastic and metaphysical conceit—

"That trimming slight           Which takes our late fantastics with delight."

What is worst and what is best in Donne alike repelled Milton. His occasional conceits are rather of the Marinistic or Petrarchian type. The earth which

"woos the gentle air             To hide her guilty front with innocent snow,"

is akin to Théophile's dagger which blushed for its crime. The conceit in the lines On Shakespeare is suggested by a sonnet (cxxxi.) of Petrarch.

But conceit is a subordinate element even in