Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/205

Rh Milton of the Arthurian legend with the machinery and in the style of the classical epic. The mythical character of the story may have repelled the Puritan; and it made the subject unsuitable for the epic according to Tasso's theory. His failure with Arthur, or some other reason, inclined him for a time to the drama, and in 1640-42 he was busy noting possible themes, mainly scriptural but not excluding history, and outlining plays on the subject of the Fall, which contain already all the principal moments of Paradise Lost, when he was diverted by what he deemed the more pressing duty of moulding England to a chosen people of God, and emptying the phials of his wrath on those who retarded this consummation. During these years his only poems were the occasional sonnets. Johnson's neo-classical prejudices saw in the sonnet merely an elegant trifle, but Milton was following the greatest of his Italian masters in using the sonnet to utter trumpet-notes on political themes; and the grand style to which he had finally attained in Lycidas is as evident as in Paradise Lost in these splendid, and in the history of English poetry so inspiring, poems.

The years of Milton's silence as a poet were years of rapid poetic decadence and transition. How remote Milton's poetry in style and conception was from the fashionable verse of the day it needs only a glance at the volume which contained Lycidas to realise. That great poem had