the exquisite ear was also at the service of a character of unique dignity, moved by intense convictions, contemptuous of all that was mean and trivial; hard, dogmatic, and unsympathetic, but constantly under the stress of intense and massive emotion, which finds its natural clothing in his unequalled diction. The impossibility of adopting the diction when the thought is feeble is curiously illustrated by Milton's influence on the eighteenth century. Professor Raleigh declares that 'English verse went Milton-mad' during the reign of Pope, and exemplifies the remark abundantly from such men as Thomson, Young, and Akenside. Milton is partly responsible for the mannerism which excited Wordsworth's revolt. Addison already gives the theory. A poet, he says, who seeks for 'perspicuity' alone is in danger of becoming vulgar. He must avoid that fault by 'guarding himself against idiomatic ways of speaking'; and for that purpose, among other expedients, he may use the idioms of other languages; as Milton indulges in Latinisms, and grammatical inversions. To the school of Pope 'perspicuity' became the cardinal virtue, as suited to an age in which the imagination was kept in strict bondage by the reason; and Pope's
