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Milton at times preferred the authority of the Scriptures and Homer to that of Virgil and his more artificial school, and had no hesitation to repeat the same word in the same line or same sentence. A very remarkable instance is vii. 359-365, where, in the space of seven lines, the word light occurs not less than four times.

But the most remarkable peculiarity of Paradise Lost, from which his preceding poetry is perfectly free, and one to which the critics have agreed to show no mercy, is the frequent plays upon words, which are held to disfigure it. We will not attempt to excuse or defend them, for they are not by any means objects of our admiration; but we will endeavour to account for them. They are then no proof of Milton's bad taste, but spring from the same source as so many of his other errors-his thraldom to the letter of Scripture, and his consequent persuasion that anything found there was, as being the dictation of the Spirit, right, and deserving of imitation. As examples, we need only to remind the reader of the well-known "beseeching or besieging," "brought into the world a world of woe," etc.

In that very part of Scripture on which Milton founded his poem, we meet with the following instance of the Paronomasia, as writers on rhetoric designate this mode of playing upon words. "And they were both naked ('arúmmîm, D’piỵ) . and the serpent was subtle ('arúm, y)." Again, in the same book (xxix. 10), " And he watered (yasheq, p) the flock . . . . and kissed (yishaq, PW) Rachel." So also (Judges xv. 16), " And Samson said, With the jawbone of an ass (hakhamor, ), heaps upon heaps (khamór khamórathayim,

i)." Many other instances will be found in other parts of Scripture, especially in the Prophets, more particularly in Isaiah, for whom Milton's admiration was most profound; something of the same kind may also be discerned in the Epistles of St. Paul.

Another practice of Milton's may have had its origin also in his veneration for the language of Scripture. It is well known that the genitive its was not used in poetry or the higher prose till after the middle of the seventeenth cen

*

tury; his being the genitive of both he and it, as may be seen in the Bible and Milton. Now in upwards of thirty places of his poems Milton has her.† The far greater part of these, no doubt, such as earth, region, valley, Paradise, are feminine in Latin; but there are others, such as heaven, hell, deep, firmament, which are neuter. As then some words, such as animal, which are neuter in Latin, are feminine in Hebrew, in which language also the adjectival form, which is neuter in Latin, is feminine, this circumstance may-for we would not assert ithave operated on the mind of the poet.

A peculiarity of Milton's poetic language, arising evidently from the fineness and delicacy of his musical ear, was his avoidance of the unpleasant sound of sh in the Hebrew proper names. With all his veneration for the Hebrew Scriptures, he, on this point, preferred to follow the LXX and the Vulgate. Thus, instead of Beersheba, we have Beersaba; for Heshbon, Hesebon; for Bashan, Basan; and so forth. He also has Sirocco for the Italian Scirocco. In fact, the only names in which he has retained the sh sound are Joshua, Goshen, and Ashtaroth. He seems to have adopted this principle long before the era of Paradise Lost, for in one of his early prose works we meet with "Abimelech and the Sechemites.”‡

Milton, it is evident, had no dislike to the aspirate; yet for some reason unknown to us, he has given Oreb, Auran, and Ades, instead of Horeb, Hauran, and Hades.

* Shakespeare uses its.-Winter Tale, i. 2; Henry VIII. i. 1. Milton has it once, Hymn on Nat. st. x.

+ Both Spenser and Fairfax use her occasionally, mostly with Latin feminines; at times with neuters, as heart.

We need hardly observe that the sh sound is frequently avoided in the dramatists by adding a syllable, as it were, as 'condition.' But this was the original mode of pronouncing ci and ti in all words of this form derived from the Latin and French, as we may see in Chaucer.

440

THE VERSE.

THE verse of Paradise Lost-we might indeed say, our blank verse in general-does not seem to be as yet generally understood. It is really painful to read Johnson's essay on the subject, and to see him signalizing some of the most melodious lines of the poem as wanting in the very quality which most distinguishes them. But Johnson had no ear whatever for the variety of poetic melody, he could only discern and enjoy mechanic forms; the heroic verse, in which the accent falls regularly on every alternate syllable, he regarded as perfect, what varied from that standard as faulty, imperfect, and inharmonious. In fact, he reminds one of the decision of the ass, in the Italian poet's ingenious apologue, when chosen to decide whether the palm for musical skill should be given to the nightingale or the cuckoo. "It may be, Madam Nightingale," said the donkey to the former, "that your song has more trills and turns in it than that of the cuckoo, but the cuckoo's has more method."

Modern blank verse seems to be indebted for its origin to the Italians. The Provençal poets made frequent use of a line of five feet, sometimes with, but more usually without, a hypermetric syllable, but always riming, and always, like the French measure derived from it, with the cæsura at the end of the second foot. They had probably derived it from the Latin hendecasyllables, with which, when not read metrically, it pretty accurately corresponds: ex. gr.

Lugéte Vénerès Cupídinésque.

The Italians, as is well known, derived their poetic forms in

general from the Troubadours, and the hendecasyllabic, or fivefoot line, became the sole measure of their sonnets and the staple of their Canzoni, and also their heroic measure in the Terza Rima of Dante and the Ottava Rima of Boccaccio. But it is a fact not generally observed, that Dante's contemporary, Barberini, employed the five-foot line, both rimed and unrimed, in his poems named Documenti d'Amore and Reggimento delle Donne:* ex. gr.

Questa Giustizia, da tal Sir mandata,
È senza prova di falli insegnata.
Ne vien misericordia con lei

S' el con rigor va giudicando i rei.

Or incomincia dir ciò ch' ella face;

Fa-poi non giova-ben ciascun che tace, etc.

Da sicurtà a tutta gente Amore,

E fa portar li fériti e li morti

Davanti a lui, e dice sovra loro

Queste parole che qui sono scritte, etc.

In these poems of Barberini, the cæsura almost always occurs at the end of the second foot, though not with the strict regularity of the Provençal and French measures, while in the sonnets and other forms this is not the case.

The riming couplet never found favour in the eyes of the Italian poets; but early in the sixteenth century the blank verse, under the name of Versi Sciolti, was adopted for the nascent tragic drama, and was used by Rucellai in his didactic poem L'Api, and by Trissino in his epic L'Italia liberata da' Goti, but with the varied cæsura then general in Italian poetry. At the same time, in Spain, Boscan, in imitation of the Italian poets, translated Hero and Leander from the Greek in this measure.† With the exception of the drama,

* See the passages quoted by Rossetti in his Spirito Antipapale, p. 289.

+ Milton, in his notice of The Verse prefixed to his Paradise Lost, says, "Not without cause, therefore, some both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note have rejected rime both in longer and shorter works; as have also long since our best English tragedies." He of course alludes to (beside those mentioned in the text) La Coltivazione of Alamanni, Le Sette Giornate of T. Tasso, and the Aminta, Pastor Fido, etc. As we know not what his Spanish reading was,

and of some pieces by Chiabrera, the Versi Sciolti ceased, we believe, to form a part of Italian poetry till the end of the last century, when they were employed by Parini and others. About the same time they were adopted and became a favourite form in the revived poetry of Portugal and Brazil. Perhaps in both cases it arose from the admiration of the poetry of Milton, Young, and Thomson.

The English language borrowed its poetic measures from the French and Provençal. It first adopted the four-foot and six-foot measures; but as the Anglo-Saxon verse, like that of the whole Teutonic family, had been regulated by alliteration and accent, not by quantity or number of syllables, the English poets would not submit to the restraint of having the same exact number of syllables in a line, but regulating their verse by accent alone, admitted feet of one or of three syllables into their lines.* The five-foot measure was introduced

by Chaucer; and as he used the same freedom of cæsura as the Italian poets, we think it more likely that he adopted it from them, with whose poetry he was so familiar, than from the poets of France or of Provence.

The earliest specimen of blank verse in English is the translation of the second and fourth books of the Eneis by the accomplished Earl of Surrey, who fell a victim to the ruthless tyranny of Henry VIII. in 1547. As he was so well versed in Italian literature, it seems more probable that he adopted it from Rucellai and others, than that he formed it from the five-foot riming measures of his own language. As

we cannot be certain whether he was acquainted with Boscan's poem or not, or with the short pieces of Garcilaso de la Vega, Figueroa, and others; but it is highly probable that he may have read Jauregui's beautiful translation of the Aminta, which was printed at Rome in 1607, and which he may have purchased when he was in Italy. He would seem not to have known, or rather not to have recollected, Lord Surrey's verses, of which we are about to speak.

* It was the same with the old poetry of Germany. In the Nibelungen Lied, feet of one and of three syllables are of frequent occurrence. It may be here observed, that the measure of this poem occurs in English in the Coke's Tale of Gamelyn, and other poems of the same kind, and in Spanish in the old poem of the Cid.

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