Milton was the darling poet of our greatest modern master of unadorned Saxon speech, John Bright.

But it is freighted with classic allusion--not alone from the ancient classics--and comes to us rich with gathered sweets, like a wind laden with the scent of many flowers.

"It is," says Pattison, "the elaborated outcome of all the best words of all antecedent poetry--the language of one who lives in the companionship of the great and the wise of past time." "Words," the same writer reminds us, "over and above their dictionary signification, connote all the feeling which has gathered round them by reason of their employment through a hundred generations of song." So it is, every word seems instinct with its own peculiar beauty, and fraught with its own peculiar association, and yet each detail is strictly subordinate to the general effect.

No poet of Milton's rank, probably, has been equally indebted to his predecessors, not only for his vocabulary, but for his thoughts.

Reminiscences throng upon him, and he takes all that comes, knowing that he can make it lawfully his own.