From the following sentence of Hallam on the prose style of Milton, we must express our total dissent.

Even in the Areopagitica he frequently sinks in a single instant, as is usual with our old writers, from his highest flights to the ground; his intermixture of familiar with learned phraseology is unpleasing; his structure is affectedly elaborate; and he seldom reaches any harmony. If he turns to invective, as sometimes in this treatise, and more in his Apology for Smectymnuus, it is mere ribaldrous vulgarity blended with pedantry; his wit is always poor and without ease. An absence of idiomatic grace, and a use of harsh inversions, violating the rules of the language, distinguish in general the writings of Milton.*

Every writer should be judged by the laws and usages of his own time, for nothing is more fleeting and capricious than phraseology. The graceful and elegant of one period becomes often the coarse and indecent of another of more real or fancied refinement. Thus the Spectator was regarded as a model of propriety at the time it was written, yet now it is frequently withheld from the young and from the fair, on account of its indelicacy. In like manner, in the middle of the last century, Fielding, when dedicating his immortal romance to the virtuous Lord Lyttleton, could say, and we believe with perfect truth, that the reader would find in it "nothing inconsistent with the strictest rules of decency, nor which can offend even the chastest eye in the perusal." Yet what is the current opinion on that subject at present! Refined and delicate as we fancy the literature of the present day to be, a period of super-refinement may arrive which may withhold some of it from the hands of the young and the fair. The Horatian Ut silvæ foliis pronos, etc., applies to ideas and phrases as well as to the single words. We say then, let Milton be judged by the standard of his *Literature of Europe, iii. 151.

age, and we will maintain that, in all his writings, there is not a single passage to which the expression "ribaldrous vulgarity" can with justice be applied. Neither do we esteem his wit to be so very "poor," for we meet with passages of genuine humour; though, as he himself avowed, even in his younger days, humour was not his talent. As to his "never reaching any harmony," we think it sufficient to refer the reader to our extracts from his writings. To our ear, there are few passages in Milton less harmonious than this very passage quoted from Mr. Hallam's own work.

MILTON'S LATIN WRITINGS.

MILTON, like most of the learned men of the age, wrote in Latin both in prose and verse. The former will, we believe, bear a comparison with any Latin prose of the time, unless we should think that of the natives of the countries which speak languages derived from the Latin to be excepted; as a modern Latin poet, critics are disposed to assign him a place in the first rank. It is not unworthy of notice, that while in English prose he delighted in long and involved sentences, his Latin periods are neither very long nor much involved. This probably arose from his close adherence to his models; for the genius of the Latin language, unlike the Greek, is inclined to brevity and condensation.

To own the truth, we are no great admirers of modern Latin. In the middle and subsequent ages, when modern languages were little cultivated and were rarely learned by strangers, a writer had but a slender chance of being known out of his own country if he used his mother-tongue; men of letters also formed then a more distinct class than they do at present, and they wrote for their own society rather than for the public. The Latin had been transmitted as the language of literature; annals and chronicles were usually written in it, as well as works of science; it was the common language of men

of learning, and he who wrote in it might reckon on being read wherever literature was cultivated. Thus, to take an example from the North, the History of Saxo Grammaticus was well known out of Denmark, where it was written, while the more valuable Heimskringla of Snorro was only known to those who spoke the Icelandic language. Even in the sixteenth century, Mariana, De Thou, Buchanan, and others, wrote their Histories in Latin, in the hope of being more extensively read and known. In like manner, when men of genius and learn. ing were endowed with poetic talent, they exercised it in the language which alone was esteemed by the members of their society. Thus Dante, it is said,—but we have some doubt on the subject,-at first proposed to write his great poem in Latin, and Petrarca actually did write in that language his Africa, the poem from which he expected his highest fame, while on his vernacular poetry he set comparatively little value. We need not say how posterity has reversed his judgement. Bembo, too, seriously urged Ariosto to write his graceful and sportive poem in Latin; but perhaps he did not know of what species it was intended to be. The Latin poetry however of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries consisted on the whole chiefly of short pieces, such as odes and elegies. It was admired in its day, but for many years it has only been known to a few students. No poet whatever has obtained permanent fame by his Latin verses.

There is, and must be, one incurable defect in all composition in a dead language; it belongs to no particular period, writers of various ages having been used as models and authorities. Let us suppose a Horatius Redivivus, and that some modern Latin poetry were shown to him. He would probably observe on some words or

phrases, that no doubt they were to be found in Terence and Plautus, but that they had become quite antiquated in his time; others he knew to be in Catullus and Lucretius, but that he and his contemporaries would not have ventured to use them. Of others he would profess himself to be utterly ignorant, though perhaps he would not take on him to assert that they were bad, these came from Juvenal, Statius, and others, down to Claudian; finally, he might light on some which he would pronounce to be absolute solecisms and barbarisms,— namely, modern ideas and phraseology in a Latin dress.

In fact, modern Latin poetry is an exotic, a mere hothouse plant, which evermore reminds us that it does not spring from the soil. He that writes it is always held down by secret chains, his wings are clipped, and he can never soar into the regions of poetic space. Spite of himself he must be a mere ape of the ancients, for he may be called on to give his authority for every term he employs. Look at Milton's lines on the deaths of the Bishops of Winchester and Ely, and compare them with those on the Marchioness of Winchester, written about the same time, and the difference between compositions in a living and in a dead language will be apparent. How fortunate was it that he did not write his Ode on the Nativity in Latin; the same ideas and sentiments might no doubt have been there, but how differently expressed! Beautiful as Milton's Latin poetry must be confessed to be, it probably does not find, even among those familiar with the language, one reader for fifty readers of his English poetry, and few perhaps ever read his Latin poems without a secret wish that he had written them in English.

We are, it must be again confessed, no friends to