HKB
inspired thought and purity of diction the Holy Living, 1650, and the Holy Dying, 1651, of Jeremy Taylor, a gifted young divine, rank preëminent in the prose of the Commonwealth.
But without question the ablest prose of the period came from the pen of Cromwell's Latin Secretary of State, John Milton. Milton stands in his own time a peculiarly isolated figure. We never in thought associate him with his contemporaries. Dryden had become the leading literary figure in London before Milton wrote his great epic; yet, were it not for definite chronology, we should scarcely realize that they worked in the same century. While, therefore, no sketch of seventeenth-century literature can exclude Milton, he must be taken by himself, without relation to the development, forms, and spirit of his age, and must be regarded, rather, as a late-born Elizabethan.
When Dryden was born, Milton at twenty-three was just completing his seven years at Cambridge, and as the younger poet grew through boyhood, the elder was enriching English verse with his Juvenilia. Then came the twenty years of strife. As Secretary of the Commonwealth, he threw himself into controversial prose. His Iconoclast, the Divorce pamphlets, the Smectymnuus tracts, and the Areopagitica date from this period. A strong partisan of the Commonwealth, he was in emphatic disfavor at the Restoration. Blind and in hiding, deserted by one-time friends, out of sympathy with his age, he fulfilled the promise of his youth: he turned again to poetry; and in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained*, and *Samson Agonistes he has left us "something so written that the world shall not willingly let it die."
I have said that Milton's poetry differed distinctly from the poetry of his age. The verse that Dryden was reading as a schoolboy was quite other than L'Allegro and Lycidas. In the closing years of the preceding century, John Donne had traveled in Italy. There the poet Marino was developing fantastic eccentricities in verse. Donne under similar influences adopted similar methods.
To seize upon the quaintest possible thought and then to express it in as quaint a manner as possible became the chief aim of English poets during the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century. Donne had encountered trouble in obtaining his wife from her father. Finding one morning a flea that had feasted during the night on his wife and himself, he was overcome by its poetic possibilities, and wrote:
"This flea is you and I, and this Our marriage bed and temple is; Tho' parents frown, and you, we're met And cloister'd in these living walls of jet."
To strain after conceits, to strive for quaintness of thought and expression, was the striking characteristic of all the poets of the generation, to whom Dr. Johnson gave the title Metaphysical, and who are now known as the Marinists. There were Quarles, with his Dutch Emblems; Vaughan, Sandys, Crashaw, and pure-souled George Herbert, with his Temple. There were Carew, with the Rapture; Wither and his "Shall I wasting in despair"; the two dashing Cavaliers Suckling and Lovelace, the latter the only man who ever received an M.A. for his personal beauty. There was Herrick, the dispossessed Devonshire rector, with Hesperides and Noble Numbers, freer than were the others from the beauty-marring conceits of the time. There, too, were to be found the gallant love-maker Waller, Cowley, the queen's secretary during her exile, and Marvell, Milton's assistant Secretary of State. But these three men were to pledge allegiance to a new sovereignty in English verse.