And all that band them to resist His uncontrollable intent. His servants He, with new acquist Of true experience from this great event, With peace and consolation hath dismissed, And calm of mind, all passion spent. THE END ESSAY ON MILTON'S ENGLISH AND VERSIFICATION. THE following remarks relate to Milton's Poetry only, any references to his Prose being but incidental. may arrange themselves under five heads : I. Milton's Vocabulary. II. Spelling and Pronunciation. : III. Peculiarities of Grammatical Inflection. IV. Syntax and Idiom. The remarks V. Milton's Versification, and his Place in the History of English Verse. I. MILTON'S VOCABULARY. It has been computed that Milton's total vocabulary in his poetry, to the exclusion of his prose-writings, consists of about 8000 words. In this computation all separate parts of speech are counted as distinct words, but inflections of any one part of speech are not so counted. By a similar computation it is found that Shakespeare's vocabulary in his Plays and Poems consists of about 15,000 words. The greater extent of Shakespeare's poetical vocabulary, as compared with Milton's, may be accounted for partly by the greater bulk of the poetical matter from which the vocabulary is gathered; but it is, doubtless, owing in part also to the greater multifariousness of that aggregate of things and notions amid which Shakespeare's imagination moved for the purposes of his dramas. An interesting question with respect to any English writer the extent of whose total vocabulary may have been ascertained is the question what proportion of that vocabulary consists of words of the old native English or "Anglo |