strictly speaking not Sonnets at all; Milton is the first English writer in whom the form of the Sonnet approaches the type set by the best Italian writers. The following are the principal Rules of the Sonnet deduced from their usage.

1o, The Sonnet must contain fourteen lines of five accents each.

2o, Lines 1-8 must form two quatrains with only two rimes, arranged according to the following scheme: a, b, b, a, a, b, b, a.

3o, Lines 9-14 must contain two tercets with either two rimes or three. The tercets must not reproduce the rimes of the quatrains.

4o, The two last lines must not rime. (This rule is not strictly observed by Milton or by Wordsworth).

These rules, in spite of their appearance of artificiality, are really grounded upon common sense. The following brief suggestions may start you along a line of thought that you can profitably follow up for yourself.

1o, "The limit of the Sonnet is imposed by the average duration of an emotional mood."

(Pattison).

2o & 3o, The division into quatrains and tercets is based upon the law of effect by contrast.

4o, The Sonnet as a whole being intended to express one thought or feeling must adopt a metrical form that will carry the thought smoothly and continuously to the end. If the two last lines rime, they seem to stand out separated from the body of the poem. Notice this in the Sonnet to Cromwell, (p. 16); how inferior is the effect of this ending to that in Keats' Sonnet on Homer (p. 171) or to that in Wordsworth's Sonnet to Milton (p. 210) !

ON HIS HAVING ARRIVED AT THE AGE OF

TWENTY-THREE.

This Sonnet was sent to a friend who had urged Milton to lead a more 'practical' life and become a clergyman at once. But Milton was wiser than his friend. He felt that the will of Heaven had destined him to be a poet. Through long years of distracting conflict he never abandoned this purpose; the result was Paradise Lost.

sheweth. This is not a faulty rime, since this word, though now commonly spelled and pronounced show, in Milton's day was commonly spelled and pronounced as here. Both forms occur in his poems, but shew much oftener than show. The etymology (Middle English shewen') decides that shew is the older form. semblance; Milton had a remarkably beautiful and youthful face. At college he was nick-named 'The Lady of Christ's.'

TO THE LORD GENERAL CROMWELL.

my

The 'certain ministers' were John Owen and other Independents who desired State-support for the clergy. The 'Committee for Propagation of the Gospel' was a Committee of the Rump Parliament who had charge of ecclesiastical affairs. Milton's lines are both a general plea for religious freedom and a special appeal to Cromwell to 'Save us from our friends!' This the Lord General did very effectively ten months later by calling in his troopers to expel

the Rump.

The members departed so little regretted, he declares, that not

even a dog barked as they left the place.

Darwen

the neck of crowned Fortune. A biblical metaphor; Genesis XLIX. S. trophies; a word with an interesting etymology. What do you think of trophies reared on a neck? stream; near Preston in Lancashire where Cromwell defeated the Scotch under the Duke of Hamilton, August, 1648. Dunbar; Worcester; Cromwellian victories, Sept. 3, 1650, and Sept. 3, 1651. For a vivid picture of Dunbar fight see Carlyle's Cromwell, Letters 139-146; for Worcester, Letters 182-183. new foes; Owen and his associates, as distinguished from the old foes, Presbyterians, who had been long committed to the policy of an established church. What is the famous line in this Sonnet?

ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT.

In 1655 the Duke of Savoy had attempted by force to convert some of his Protestant subjects to Catholicism. As Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth it was Milton's duty to draft the letter of remonstrance sent to the Duke on this occasion by Cromwell. In that document, diplomatic courtesy restrained him from giving vent to the grievous indignation which, in this Sonnet, bursts forth like a bright and consuming fire. The leading thought in this Sonnet is as old as Tertullian, the imagery is trite, the diction is of the utmost simplicity; yet so great was this man's soul and so deep the passion he has put into these few lines, that after the lapse of nearly two centuries and a half he makes us feel the shock of strong emotion that swept over him when he heard of the cruel deeds of the "bloody Piedmontese."

Consult your English History for the parts played by Cromwell and Mazarin in this affair.

Alpine mountains cold. This phrase is from Fairfax's Tasso, XIII. 60.

Into the valleys greene

Distilled from tops of Alpine mountains cold.

of old. The form of Christianity professed by the Waldenses antedated the 16th Century Reformation. stocks and stones. The Puritans regarded Roman Catholicism as a species of idolatry. The incident referred to in lines 7-8 is illustrated by a cut in a book published in 1658 by Sir William Moreland, Cromwell's Agent at Geneva. The triple tyrant, meaning the Pope, so called from his tiara or triple crown. See Brewer, article Tiara.' Babylonian woe. Rome was looked upon by the Puritans as the Babylon of Revelation XVII. and XVIII.

ON HIS BLINDNESS.

The year in which Milton became totally blind is not known with certainty. It was probably about 1652, since in that year he was allowed an Assistant

Secretary. As he explains in the next Sonnet, loss of eyesight was hastened by his labor upon his Defense of the English People against Salmasius.

talent; Matthew XXV. 14-30.

thousands at his bidding speed.

We have the same thought in Par. Lost, IV. 677-8.

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.

Compare also the Te Deum, 2-3.

All the earth doth worship thee.

To thee all Angels cry aloud; the Heavens and all the Powers therein. post. This word is a bit of fossil history; it will repay you to dig it out. They also serve who only stand and wait; a beautiful expression of a beautiful thought that has brought consolation to thousands of weary souls.

TO CYRIACK SKINNER.

Skinner had been a pupil of Milton's and at the date of this Sonnet (probably 1655) was a lawyer of some prominence. this three years' day. We have a similar phrase in 2 Henry VI. ii. 1; 'these seven years' day.' rings; the Cambridge MS. reads 'talks' which is so much feebler, that Pattison is almost the only editor who retains it. With the magnificent courage of this Sonnet

compare the pathetic resignation of

Thus with the year

Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and, for the book of knowledge fair,
Presented with a universal blank

Of Nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
Par. Lost, III. 40-50.

Of the six short poems of Milton here given, you will do well to commit to memory the lines On Shakespeare, On His Having Arrived at the Age of Twenty-Three, and either the Sonnet On His Blindness or To Cyriack Skinner. From these, you cannot fail to learn that Nobility of Thought goes hand-in-hand with Simplicity of Expression and that the highest poetic effects are based upon Sincerity.

INTRODUCTION TO DRYDEN AND POPE.

DURING the thirty-eight years which elapsed between Milton's Sonnet to Skinner and Dryden's Epistle to Congreve, a great change came over the spirit of English literature. Even before the outbreak of the Civil War (1642) it was evident that the Romantic movement had almost spent its force, running off into such absurdities and extravagancies that even the prosy Waller was welcomed with relief as the herald of a new age. During the time of Puritan ascendancy (1649-1660), with the exception of an occasional Sonnet from Milton, Literature, suffering in silence, hid her diminished head. When she emerged at the Restoration, she found herself in a new world; a world of Realism to which Idealism was dead, a world on whose map the Forest of Ardennes is undiscoverable, but on which the Mall and the Coffee House are printed in large letters.

It has been seriously maintained that the poets of this agesuch great literary artists as Dryden and Pope-are not poets at all. But surely they dwell in a Poetry Land of narrow dimensions who cannot find room in it for the author of the Absalom and Achitophel and of the Epistle to Augustus. Was ever dictum more absurd than the following, advanced by a critic of some repute;1 'Dryden is perhaps the only great writer - he is certainly the only English poet of high rank who appears to be wholly destitute of the gift of observation.'(!) Observation of what? Surely there is power of observing Human Nature in him who etched Zimri, in lines as clear-cut today as they were two hundred years ago. And is not Human Nature as worthy an object of study as Inanimate Nature? Does not its delineation call for as high poetic powers? 'The proper study of mankind is man.' Was there ever a truer line than this hackneyed one of Pope's hackneyed because so true?

The eighteenth century poets then (and with them Dryden belongs) are the poets of Human Nature, or, more specifically, of Man in Society; they confine themselves almost exclusively to this topic; they love the 'sweet shady side of Pall Mall;' caring almost nothing for Inanimate Nature, they have their limits, but within these limits they are unexcelled for keen observation and for aphoristic expression. The form which this expression takes is almost invariably the heroic couplet, an instrument that Dryden forged out of crude materials,? and that Pope polished until it became smooth and shining as a Venetian dagger of glass. Let us not quarrel with them, as did Wordsworth, because

1 Gosse. History of 18th Century Literature, p. 379.

2 The Chaucerian 'couplet' is a different thing. For illustrations, see Notes on Dryden's Character of a Good Parson, pp. 31-32.

they contain few 'images from Nature,' but rather let us study them sympathetically, remembering Dryden's saying: Poetry, which is an image of Nature, must generally please, but 'tis not to be understood that all parts of it must please every man.

JOHN DRYDEN.

BORN in Northamptonshire in 1631. He came of a Puritan family, and accordingly was sent to Cambridge, where he took his degree in 1654. The political and religious tendencies of his later years estranged him completely from his University, causing him even to write,

Oxford to him a dearer name shall be
Than his own mother University.

After the Restoration (1660) he took to the writing of plays, — almost the only means by which a professional author could then make a living. But his genius was not dramatic, and few of his many attempts in this line are now read, except as literary curiosities. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1670. He did not find his true vein until 1681, when he published the Absalom and Achitophel, the greatest of English satires in verse. Macflecknoe (1682) is hardly inferior. At the Revolution (1688) he was deprived of his position as Poet Laureate, and was compelled to return to the uncongenial task of playwriting. To many of his plays he prefixed introductions in which, for the first time in England, the laws of dramatic criticism were stated and discussed clearly and acutely. The prose style of these prefaces is clean-cut and modern, and entitles Dryden to the distinction of being the first to break away from the cumbersome periods in which English prose had heretofore obscured itself. His later years were spent upon his translation of Vergil and his Fables. His mind was always quick to welcome new ideas, and the work of his declining years, though in a lighter vein, shows no falling-off from the high standard of his prime. He died in 1700.

CONTEMPORARIES - Milton, Charles II., Cowley, Addison, Swift, Pope.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

LIFE AND TIMES. - The complete works of Dryden are to be found in Saintsbury's edition of 18 vols., published by Paterson, of Edinburgh. This edition is a revision of Scott's; it is expensive, and hardly to be found, except in a large city or university library. As a partial substitute may be used (1) Saintsbury's Life in the E.M.L., a model short biography; (2) Christie's excellent edition of the Poems; (3) T. Arnold's edition of the Essay on Dramatic Poetry (Macmillan). Malone's edition of the prose works is not easy to procure, nor is Tonson's edition of the plays.

TEXT.― Christie's (Macmillan).