Writers of all schools have felt Milton's power. What has changed has been, not their admiration, but the grounds upon which they proposed to justify it. Successive critics have tried to prove, with more or less plausibility, that Milton's poetry conformed to the canons which they accepted as orthodox. Their reasons often strike us as obsolete even when we accept their conclusions. We judge not only the critic, but the code of criticism. Professor Raleigh can hardly say anything absolutely new in the way of eulogy upon Milton, but he can give tenable grounds for the faith that is in him. He can extricate the real causes of his predecessors' enthusiasm from the sham reasons intended to justify it. Moreover, though he has enlightened his judgment by studying previous critics, he is a thoroughly independent thinker, and accepts no dictum without careful scrutiny. Perhaps here and there he takes the slightly supercilious tone of the aesthetic expert anxious to rebuff the Philistine. But he can flout the 'New Criticism'—whatever that may be—and, unlike most Miltonians, he speaks with emphatic respect of Johnson's opinions. Professor Raleigh, that is, values the masculine common-sense which to many more squeamish critics has appeared to
