There are other now unusual senses of the conjunction that: e.g. Par. Lost, III. 278, where it seems to mean inasmuch In the lines On Shakespeare we have virtually whilst that for whilst; and elsewhere I think we have that redundant. as. As appears in several senses not now common. It serves for that or as that: e.g. "a stripling cherub . . . such as in his face youth smiled celestial" (Par. Lost, III. 637, 638 compare Par. Reg., II. 97, 98); also for as if: e.g. "into strange vagaries fell, as they would dance" (Par. Lost, VI. 614, 615); also for in proportion as: e.g. "For bliss, as thou hast part, to me is bliss" (Par. Lost, IX. 879); also for such as (Il Pens. 163-165) and such that it or so that it (Od. Nat. 96-98). Of but for than "No sooner blown but blasted" (D. F. I. 1) is an early example; and the idiom recurs (Par. Lost, III. 344, 347, XI. 822, 824, etc.) In Par. Lost, v. 674, and perhaps elsewhere, and has a sense of if or though. Milton uses the word both where the reference is to more objects than two: e.g. "The God that made both sky, air, earth, and heaven" (Par. Lost, IV. 722); and he takes the same liberty with neither: e.g. "Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire" (Par. Lost, II. 912).- -The variety of his uses of or, nor, neither, etc., may be inferred from these examples, in some of which, however, change of construction by change of thought bears a part : "Or [either] envy, or what reserve, forbids to taste?"— "Much less can bird with beast or fish with fowl P. L., v. 61. P. L., VIII. 395, 396. "Or [either] east or west."-P. L., x. 685. "Which neither his foreknowing can prevent, And he the future evil shall," etc.-P. L., XI. 773, 774. "neither thus heartened or dismayed."-P. R., 1. 268. "I bid not, or forbid."-P. R., 1. 495. TRANSPOSITIONS AND INVERSIONS.-Occasionally some very striking inversion or transposition of the usual order of words in a sentence is met with in Milton: e.g. "Into this wild Abyss the wary Fiend Stood on the brink of Hell and looked a while, "Nor stood unmindful Abdiel to annoy The Atheist crew."-P. L., VI. 369, 370. "That whom they hit none on their feet might stand."- "For in their looks P. L., VI. 592. Much reason, and in their actions, oft appears."— P. L., IX. 558, 559. "Reject not, then, what offered means who knows Such transpositions are sometimes instances merely of Milton's freedom in English, which led him, like other writers, into the word-figures called by the rhetoricians Hyperbaton, Anastrophe, Dialysis, etc.; but very often they are patent Latinisms. Without dwelling longer, however, on the effects of Milton's Latinism per se on the order of his syntax, let us briefly inquire how far another cause may have co-operated in forming that structure of sentence and style which we can recognise as Miltonic. Few services of criticism to Literature have been greater than Wordsworth's famous onslaught on what he called Poetic Diction. Under this name, he denounced the notion, -made prevalent, as he maintained, by the practice of the English eighteenth-century poets, from Dryden onwards, with few exceptions,-that poetry consists in, or requires, an artificial mode of language, differing from the language of ordinary life, or of prose. The censure branched into several applications; but one of them concerned mere syntax. It was a mistake, Wordsworth contended, to suppose that Verse requires deviations from the natural prose order of words, or that such are legitimate in Verse. Unfortunately, the very name Verse had suggested the contrary; and, the difficulties of versifiers in adjusting their sense to the mechanical restraints of metre and rhyme having led to all kinds of syntactical tricks, such as the placing of an adjective after its noun, the tugging of a verb to the end of the line for the rhyme's sake, etc., these had been accepted, and Verse had come, in general, to be a kind of distorted Prose. Here, as in other things, Wordsworth held, a reform was needed. It was necessary to teach people afresh that proper verse-syntax is not distorted prose-syntax, or syntax relieved from any of the conditions imposed upon good prose, but only syntax with all the conditions of good prose retained and certain other and more exquisite and difficult conditions superadded. — -So far Wordsworth; and certainly his precept and example, in this respect, were most wholesome. Some English poets, indeed, coevals of Wordsworth, and his partners in the general crusade against "Poetic Diction," could not emancipate themselves, as he did, from the custom of a syntax mechanically inverted to suit the mere exigencies of metre and rhyme. On the whole, however, nothing has been more remarkable in the best English poetry of the present century than the return to a natural syntax, or even to the ordinary prose order of the words. Tennyson is here conspicuous. No writer is more essentially and continually the poet than he; hardly a line of his but contains that very something that distinguishes the poet from the prosaist; and yet it is not in the syntax that this differentia appears, and often, for many lines together, the words fall exactly and punctiliously into their ordinary prose places.--Not the less does it appear, both from a theoretical consideration of the subject, and from a study of the actual syntax of our truest poets, Tennyson and Wordsworth himself included, that the precept, as it was first put forth by Wordsworth, was too absolute. Besides those illegitimate inversions of prose-syntax which arise from a lazy or slovenly forcing of the metre and rhyme, there certainly are other inversions natural to verse as such, and not illegitimate. These seem to be of two sorts :-(1) There are inversions natural to the peculiar elevation of mood or feeling which prompts to verse and which verse presupposes. After all, syntax has its root in thought, and every state of mind has its own syntax. This is seen within prose itself. "Great is Diana of the Ephesians" is a different construction from "Diana of the Ephesians is great," simply because the thought is not the same. And so, in prose itself, there are all varieties of syntax, from the regularly-repeated concatenation of subject, copula, and predicate, natural to the coolest statement of facts and propositions, on to the irregular rhythm of complex meditation and emotion, verging on verse, and in fact often passing into verse. Nor, when the express limit is passed, and one leaves prose avowedly for verse, is the variability of the syntax with the movement of the thought or meaning so wholly concluded already that there can be no natural variation farther. Verse is itself a proclamation that the mood of the highest prose moments is to be prolonged and sustained; and the very devices that constitute verse not only serve for the prolongation of the mood, but occasion perpetual involutions of it and incalculable excitements. (2) Study of beauty of all kinds is natural to every artist; and the poet, when he comes to be an artist in verse, will seek beauty in sound. Here, too, though we call it art, nature dictates. The writer in verse may lawfully aim at musical effects on the ear not consistent with prose-syntax. In fact, this is not a distinct principle from the last, but only a particular implication of that principle, worthy of separate notice. The syntax of Milton's poetry certainly is affected by the verse to a larger extent than we might guess from Wordsworth's enthusiastic references to him as the perfect model for poets at the very time when he was expounding his Reform of Poetic Diction. In no poet do we see the movement of ideas, and therefore the order of the words, swayed more manifestly by that elevation of feeling, that glow of mood, which comes upon the poet when he has risen above the cool element of prose," and is "soaring in the high region of his fancies with his garland and singingrobes about him." Indeed all through his life the leading characteristic of Milton's mind was that it could not be prosaic. He lived in song; it was his most natural mode of speech. Even in his prose-writings, all that were not mere hackwork, he every now and then spurns the ground, grows metrical, and begins to ascend. And so, when he actually was in his proper element of verse, his thoughts came in an order ruled not only by the logic of custom and reason, or by that modified by the Latinism of his syntax as it would have told in prose, but also by the conditions of roused feeling musically moved. In the following passage of At a Solemn Music is there not an inversion of ordinary syntax greater in amount, and more subtle in kind, than can be debited to Latin habits of construction or to any other cause than the verse-excitement ? "Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy, With saintly shout and solemn jubilee ; With those just Spirits that wear victorious palms Singing everlastingly." In this connexion we may note the frequency with which the adjective old is put after its substantive. The word old occurs about sixty times in the poems; and nineteen times it occurs in this manner. "And last of kings and queens and heroes old" is, I think, the first case (Vac. Ex. 47); in the same piece we have "A Sibyl old" (69); after which we have "Melibaus old" (Com. 822), "Bellerus old" (Lyc. 160), "Kishon old" (Ps. LXXXIII. 37), "Saturn old" (P. L., I. 519), "heroes old" again (P. L., I. 552), "warriors old" (P. L., I. 565), "Mount Casius old" (P. L., II. 593), "the Anarch old" (P. L., 11. 988), " Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old" (P. L., III. 36), “Darkness old” (P. L., III. 421), “fables old” (P. L., x1. 11), “kings and heroes old" again (P. L., XI. 243), “Salem old” (P. R., II. 21), "seers old" (P. R., III. 15), "prophets old" again (P. R., III. 178), "Ninus old" (P. R., 111. 276), and "giants old" (S. A. 148). V. MILTON'S VERSIFICATION AND HIS PLACE IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH VERSE. Although the terms of classical Prosody—Iambus, Trochee, Spondee, Dactyl, Anapast, Tribrach, etc.-may be applied to English verse effectively enough on the principle of taking accented syllables for longs and unaccented for shorts, there is a superior convenience in some respects in the mode |