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Titus Andronicus, the commonplace of Wordsworth, the frequent inanity of the youthful Coleridge and the youthful Byron, Shelley's extravagance, Keats's cockneyism, Tennyson's mawkishness, find no counterpart in Milton's early compositions. All these great writers, though the span of some of them was but short, lived long enough to blush for much of what they had in the days of their ignorance taken for poetry. The mature Milton had no cause to be ashamed of anything written by the immature Milton, reasonable allowance being made for the inevitable infection of contemporary false taste. As a general rule, the youthful exuberance of a Shakespeare would be a better sign; faults, no less than beauties, often indicate the richness of the soil. But Milton was born to confute established opinions. Among other divergencies from usage, he was at this time a rare example of an English poet whose faculty was, in large measure, to be estimated by his essays in Latin verse. England had up to this time produced no distinguished Latin poet, though Scotland had: and had Milton's Latin poems been accessible, they would certainly have occupied a larger place in the estimation of his contemporaries than his English compositions. Even now they contribute no trifling addition to his fame, though they cannot, even as exercises, be placed in the highest rank. There are two roads to excellence in Latin verse--to write it as a scholar, or to write it as a Roman. England has once, and only once, produced a poet so entirely imbued with the Roman spirit that Latin seemed to come to him like the language of some prior state of existence, rather remembered than learned. Landor's Latin verse is hence greatly superior to Milton's, not, perhaps, in scholarly elegance, but in absolute vitality. It would be poor praise to commend it for fidelity to the antique, for it is the antique. Milton stands at the head of the numerous class who, not being actually born Romans, have all but made themselves so.
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With a great sum obtained I this freedom. His Latin compositions are delightful, but precisely from the qualities least characteristic of his genius as an English poet. Sublimity and imagination are infrequent; what we have most commonly to admire are grace, ease, polish, and felicitous phrases rather concise in expression than weighty with matter. Of these merits the elegies to his friend Diodati, and the lines addressed to his father and to Manso, are admirable examples. The
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Epitaphium Damonis
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Sonnet to the Nightingale,
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L'Allegro,
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Il Penseroso, all probably written in 1633;
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Arcades, probably, and
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Comus certainly written in 1634;
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Lycidas