In saying that Milton's sonnet work signalised a return to the original code, we have hitherto been led astray by cursory observation of the mere arrangement of his rhymes. Milton's sonnets, like Shakspeare's, are essentially English in all that constitutes. their fundamental character. Points of departure from the primary English structure, however, Milton did initiate, and the full sum of gain and loss involved may be seen by technical analysis of that most memorable utterance which concentrates the varied excellences and defects of his sonnet muse.

Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones

Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones,
Forget not in thy book record their groans

Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they

To Heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway

The triple Tyrant; and from these may grow
A hundred fold, who having learnt thy way,

Early may fly the Babylonian woe.

Setting aside the august conception generated by this majestic invocation, and addressing ourselves dispassionately to the observation of its artistic qualities, we first perceive that the rhyme. scheme of the sonnet yields obedience to the rigid Petrarchian

rule, demanding four different sounds. Beyond this no canon of art peculiar to the approved Italian pattern has been regarded. Indeed the essential part of the code has been violated. But what is the value of the concession? Are the potentialities of the Italian sonnet in our language triumphantly displayed? Surely not so. Milton wrote no more than eighteen English sonnets, and were they all faultless examples, being so few, the possibilities of the original structure would not be assured. When a great poet, following in his steps, made effort to imitate his form of sonnet, the all but insurmountable difficulty of doing so continuously and under every condition of impulse became apparent. After a single experimental effort, Wordsworth's early sonnets were in all respects counterparts to Milton's, but the great body of his later sonnet writings display a preponderating percentage which must be pronounced irregular if judged of by Milton's standard. Nor can the few examples

Milton himself achieved be considered free from marks of the mischief induced by working in unwonted fetters. The grievous technical blemish of the sonnet just quoted is, that the vowel sounds of the rhyme words are throughout uniform, and that, consequently, the sensitive ear is from first to last deprived of the grateful sense of flow and ebb of melody which the alternate open and close vowels afford. Moreover, that Milton never made conscious endeavour to imitate the Petrarchian model becomes apparent by observation of his Italian sonnets, for in them the rhyme arrangement, though usually accurate at the beginning, is invariably faulty at the end. Whilst similar to the English examples in intellectual design, they are all, except

ing two, yet nearer akin to the native form in closing with a couplet. The essential point of Milton's departure from the original code, however, is of more consequence than mere technical divergence, and lies in the radical structure of his sonnet-thought. A metrical subdivision into octave and sestet he certainly observes, and in this particular gravitates by force of instinct towards the method of the Italian poets, but no corresponding or answering intellectual and emotional subdivision is in his work ever aimed at. Octave flows into sestet without break of music or thought, which are sustained in one long breath from the first syllable to the last. This circumstance should itself serve as a satisfying refutation of those writers who, without reflection, go on asserting time after time that the potentialities of the Italian structure in English were by Milton first signalised and maintained. The clear truth that certain earlier poets who wrote exclusively in the Shakspearean form came, consciously or unconsciously, into closer accord with the canon requiring a subdivision of thought and melody, may be seen by setting side by side with the sonnet by Milton, already quoted, the following by Drayton, on lovers parting :

Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part,

Nay I have done, you get no more of me;
And I am glad, yea, glad with all my heart,
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
Shake hands for ever-cancel all our vows-
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows
That we one jot of former love retain.

Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,

When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,

And Innocence is closing up his eyes,—

Now if thou would'st, when all have given him over,

From death to life thou might'st him yet recover.

Here are seen two facets of a sentiment, each as distinct from the other as the unequal parts of an acorn, and yet as indissolubly united beneath the amalgamating shell of a single, rounded, and perfected conception. Drayton never repeated the scheme, nor is it certain that any Shakspearean sonnet-writer consciously employed it, and the example is quoted in this connection with no other purpose than to show that so far from imitating the foreign model, Milton was behind other poets in appropriation of its salient feature of design, and thus to disturb the popular ascription to Milton of a desire deliberately to vindicate the Italian sonnet in England.

What may with unerring accuracy be ascribed to Milton is a desire to vindicate the English sonnet in England. His method of thought is such as has ever been native in our literature. Notwithstanding the rhetorical element interfused, his sonnet work has little in common with that of the poets who approached this form of verse fresh from the schools of the rhetoricians. Milton is throughout faithful to his English intellect, and his sonnets are, in the main, such as Shakspeare himself might have conceived, less much wealth of symbolic invention, and with an added weight and mass of diction. In tracing, therefore, the development of the sonnet in our language, what remains to be

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tabulated as Milton's ultimate contribution is an arrangement of rhyme which, in the hands of a master, lends itself to a mighty sweep of music, an abandonment of all point and climax, an effort after singleness of effect.

Within the lines of Shakspeare and of Milton all foremost sonnet-writers down to our own day have been content to work : on the one hand, Drayton, Coleridge, Hood, W. C. Roscoe, Tennyson-Turner; on the other, Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Keats, indeed, who employed both English methods, seemed scarcely satisfied with either, and produced examples that unite certain of the cardinal virtues of each.

And now in our time the English sonnet has taken a new direction, acquired an enlarged significance, a broader mission; and to such circumstance is clearly due the marked preference for this vehicle which has been shown by some poets whose vocation does not appear primarily to lie within the domain of verse requiring before all things emphasis and condensation. When we set ourselves to investigate the developed type, we perceive that in the main it constitutes a return to the Petrarchian pattern, prompted, however, by other purposes, and achieving other results. Its governing constituents may be speedily traversed.

The quality that gave vividness and pungency to the Shakspearean sonnet was, that in the closing couplet the subject was capable of rising to a climax; the defect of the form lay in the tendency of the two last lines to produce the dubious effect of repercussion. The conspicuous beauty of the Miltonic form has been well described by Sir Henry Taylor as the absence of point in the evolution of the idea, whose peculiar