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