better show a poet's care for unity of tone and impression. Where
Satan's prostrate bulk is compared to


that sea-beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream,


the picture that follows of the Norse-pilot mooring his boat under
the lee of the monster is completed in a line that attunes the mind
once more to all the pathos and gloom of those infernal deeps:


while night
Invests the sea, and wished morn delays.


So masterly a handling of the figures which usage and taste
prescribe to learned writers is rare indeed. The ordinary small
scholar disposes of his baggage less happily. Having heaped up
knowledge as a successful tradesman heaps up money, he is apt to
believe that his wealth makes him free of the company of letters,
and a fellow craftsman of the poets. The mark of his style is an
excessive and pretentious allusiveness. It was he whom the
satirist designed in that taunt, Scire tuum nihil est nisi te scire
hoc sciat alter--"My knowledge of thy knowledge is the knowledge
thou covetest." His allusions and learned periphrases elucidate
nothing; they put an idle labour on the reader who understands
them, and extort from baffled ignorance, at which, perhaps, they