by men like Grainger, with no poetic feeling at all. Milton's turn of phrase could be imitated, and became a mere trick when divorced from the thought. Milton, says Professor Raleigh,
invented a system of preternaturally majestic diction, perfectly fitted for the utterance of his own conceptions, but, when divorced from those conceptions, so monstrously artificial in effect that his imitators and followers, hoisting themselves on the Miltonic stilts, brought the very name of 'poetic diction' into a contempt that lasted for more than a century and is not yet wholly extinct.
We should qualify this judgment by adding that they had to find some stilts; and that, if their gait was awkward on the inappropriate elevation, Milton's magnificent power helped to preserve an ideal of poetic excellence through a period in which the highest sources of inspiration were almost closed by the general attitude of thought. I return, in short, to the point from which I started. When we criticise Milton as a religious poet, as the expounder of a theodicy or the creator of an epic, we are forced to justify admiration at the cost of condoning palpable absurdities. It becomes evident that we must rather seek to justify ourselves by showing what a surpassing power was manifested in spite of innumerable trammels imposed by the task and by the condi-
