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Rh between the Ghibelline and the Roundhead been pointed out; each, as it must be allowed, is seen at his best in the murkiness of Hell rather than in brighter climes. The learning of Milton, the deepest-read of all great poets, is well known; and critics have admired the skill with which he brings Latin words under his yoke in his Paradise Lost. For all that, were I to be asked for a short passage upon which to stake the fair fame of the English Muse, St. Peter's speech in Lycidas would be the specimen that I should choose. In that best of all patterns of Teutonic strength and pith, Milton throws away foreign gear and goes back to the middle of the Fourteenth Century; the proportion of Romance words in the passage is not greater than that employed by Minot, the bard who sang the feats of England at Cressy and Poitiers.

In Milton's time flourished Sir Thomas Browne, whose mantle long afterwards fell on Dr. Johnson, and who has therefore much to answer for as regards the corruption of English prose. It is strange to contrast Sir Thomas with another writer of his day, a tinker, who has written far better English than the learned knight, and who shows us our mother tongue in its homeliest guise, while giving us the loveliest of all Allegories. The common folk had the wit at once to see the worth of Bunyan's masterpiece, and the learned