Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/212

192 his obscure and affected style. But the greatest of heroic poets found his model, not in French epic or long-winded romance, not even in the more justly admired work of Tasso, but went back to the greater epics of Greece and Rome.

When Milton resumed the task which he had laid aside in 1641, the subject of the Fall was his final choice. The subject was to the serious thought of the seventeenth century of central importance in the history of the race, and round it had gathered the most agitating controversies in Protestant and Roman Christendom. In the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1642) Milton defined his attitude towards "the Jesuits and that sect among us which is named of Arminius": "Yet considering the perfection wherein man was created and might have stood, no decree necessitating his freewill, but subsequent, though not in time yet in order, to causes which were in his own power:  they might perhaps be persuaded to absolve both God and us." Whether this be the strictest Calvinist doctrine or not, it is the justification of "the ways of God to man" which Milton elaborated in Paradise Lost.

That his final preference of epic to dramatic form was due to the study of Andreini and Vondel is not proved and not provable. Milton's indebtedness to Vondel (which has been asserted solely on the ground of the resemblance between incidents and expressions) has not been urged or supported by those Dutch critics who have given the