Into its first consistencies; This plant thus calcined into dust But bloom and blossom [as] b[efore], When this cold numbness shall retreat By a more than chemic heat." Subscribed, immediately under the last line, are two initials, the first unfortunately so blurred by the Museum Library stamp that it cannot be distinctly made out, but the second distinctly "M"; and appended is the date "Iober 1647" i.e. "December 1647." My acquaintance with these lines dates from about 1858, when, having occasion to consult the volume containing them, I read them and took a note of them. Knowing the handwriting not to be Milton's, and seeing no reason otherwise for believing Milton to be the author, I thought nothing more necessary at the time; but in May 1866, recurring to the volume for another purpose, I thought it as well to make a copy of the pretty little curiosity, heading it in my note-book "Copy of MS. lines, in a contemporary hand (not Milton's) on the fly-page at the end of a copy of Milton's Poems, edit. 1645, in Brit. Mus. (press-mark 238 h. 5)." Thinking it not unlikely that the blurred first initial might be "J" I added "J. M." as the subscribed initials, only attaching a query to the "J" to signify uncertainty. My friend, Mr. Henry Morley, Professor of English Literature in University College, London, chancing afterwards to consult the same volume, was also attracted by the lines, and, not doubting that the handwriting was Milton's, and that the signature was "J. M.," very naturally concluded that the piece was a hitherto unknown poem by Milton, written by him for preservation, in Dec. 1647, in one of his copies of his volume of Minor Poems printed two years before. He communicated it, therefore, to the Times newspaper, where it was published under the title "An unpublished Poem by Milton," and with the signature as "J. M.," on the 16th of July, 1868. Immediately there arose a controversy on the subject, which lasted some weeks. The controversy took a wide range, and passed at length into a mere cloud of verbal criticism, with illustrative quotations from old poets, only slightly relevant to the real question. Important and relevant evidence on the negative side, however, did come out at once. Mr. Bond and Mr. Rye of the British Museum, and Mr. W. Aldis Wright of Cambridge, with other authorities, at once declared the handwriting not to be Milton's, to be so different from Milton's that it was inconceivable how anyone acquainted with Milton's hand could possibly mistake the 66 one for the other. It was found also, on close examination of the dubious initial of the signature, that it was most probably not a "J" ; and Mr. Bond made so sure that it was a P that, in sending to the Times (July 30) an exact transcript of the original, letter for letter, he gave the subscription as positively "P. M., 1ober, 1647." These items of evidence at once arrested the tendency to agree with Mr. Morley in ascribing the poem to Milton. Nevertheless, as people had taken a liking for the quaint little thing itself, argument for the possibility of its being Milton's did not wholly cease; and I believe there are still some persons who think that, after all, it may be Milton's. This is not the place for renewing the controversy in its whole extent; and I need only repeat my conviction that the sum of the evidence, external and internal, taken in every possible form of both kinds, is absolutely conclusive against the hypothesis that the poem is Milton's. One item of the internal argument, however, does concern us here. It may be called the argument from the its test. I proposed this test at the time, and I still rely upon it. We have seen Milton's habit in respect of the word its. We have seen how wonderfully he eludes the very necessity for using such a word, how the word occurs but three times in all his poetry, and how in every other case, where the necessity for such a word is not eluded, he uses his or her where we should now use its. How stands the Epitaph in this respect? It consists of but fifty-four lines, and yet the word its occurs four times in it : Now, if the professed date of the Epitaph had been some date before the end of the sixteenth century, and if the question had been as to the authenticity of the Epitaph as professing to be of such a date, these four occurrences of its in it would have proved it to be a forgery. The Chatterton antiques fell before this test among others. The question, however, is not whether the poem is a genuine production of somebody in 1647. That is not denied. The word its, as we have seen, had crept pretty widely into use by that time, and was favoured in particular districts and by particular writers; and the Epitaph, were it nothing else, would be an interesting additional illustration of the fact. But the its starts into great consequence when it is proposed to attribute the piece to Milton. Can it be supposed that a pronominal form which occurs but three times in the whole body of Milton's poetry, ranging over the entire fifty years of his literary life from 1624 to 1674, should occur four times in a single piece of fifty-four lines written by him some hour in December, 1647? Mr. Morley suggests that, whatever was Milton's general habit, the exigencies of the thought and syntax in this particular piece required the four occurrences of the word its. This, however, would but alter the form of the marvel. How was it that the very necessity for the use of the word, though Milton felt it but three times at long intervals through the rest of fifty years, came upon him with such resistless force in one fell hour in December 1647 as to extract from him then four repetitions of the word? But I deny that there was in fact any such exigency in this piece as to require Milton to depart from his custom of his or her. Take the first occurrence of its in the piece :— Here I do not see that the very slight ambiguity that might arise from the use of his would have prevented Milton from using that form, as he has in Comus, 977-8 :— "And those happy climes that lie Where day never shuts his eye." Take, again, the third instance, with its abominable grammar "Infant nature cradled here In its principles appear." Here it would surely have been more natural for Milton to use her. Thus, Par. Lost, II. 911 : "The womb of Nature, and perhaps her grave." For, in this case, in face of the fact that the writer almost personifies "nature" by the epithet "infant" and the image "cradied," how can one find a reason for the use of its in a supposed desire of the writer strongly to indicate lifelessness or sexlessness? Such a subtlety might apply better in the other two cases : "The thread of life untwisted is Into its first consistencies." "This plant thus calcined into dust In its ashes rest it must." I have found no passage in Milton in which "thread occurs in a connexion to show whether he would have used his or her with it. Nor for "plant" either have I found any such passage, unless this (Com. 620-623) be one :- "well-skilled In every virtuous plant and healing herb That spreads her verdant leaf to the morning ray." In short, the Epitaph must have been written by one of those persons in Britain in 1647 who had adopted the word its regularly into their vocabulary, and whose thinking had taken on the peculiar syntactical trick which familiarity with the word prompts and facilitates. Milton, most conspicuously, was not one of those persons. IV. SYNTAX AND IDIOM. Prefixed to Dr. E. A. Abbott's excellent Shakespearian Grammar is a little essay, in which the author sums up his observations of the differences between Elizabethan English and the present English. Although he includes all parts of Grammar, the stress of his remarks is on what we here call Syntax and Idiom. 166 66 6 "Elizabethan English, on a superficial view, appears to present this great point of difference from the English of modern times, that in the "former any irregularities whatever, whether in the formation of words "or in the combination of words into sentences, are allowable."Such is Mr. Abbott's general proposition; and he goes on to class under two heads the most notable of the so-called "irregularities ” :I. "In the first place, almost any part of speech can be used as any "other part of speech. An adverb can be used as a verb, 'They "askance their eyes'; as a noun, 'the backward and abysm of time'; or as an adjective, 'a seldom pleasure.' Any noun, adjective, or 66 neuter verb can be used as an active verb. You can 'happy' your friend, 'malice' or 'foot' your enemy, or 'fall' an axe on his neck. "An adjective can be used as an adverb, and you can speak and act 'easy,' 'free,' 'excellent'; or as a noun, and you can talk of 'fair' "instead of beauty,' and 'a pale' instead of a paleness.' . 'a . .” II. "In the second place, every variety of apparent grammatical inaccuracy "meets us :-he for him, him for he; spoke and took for spoken and "taken; plural nominatives with singular verbs; relatives omitted where they are now considered necessary; unnecessary antecedents inserted ; "shall for will, should for would, would for wish; to omitted after 'I ought,' inserted after 'I durst'; double negatives; double compara"tives and superlatives; such followed by which, that by as; as used "for 'as if,' that for 'so that'; and, lastly, some verbs apparently with "two nominatives, and others without any nominative at all. To this "long list of irregularities it may be added that many words, and par"ticularly prepositions and the infinitives of verbs, are used in a sense "different from the modern."- -Some of Mr. Abbott's accompanying explanations are worth remembering. He points out that the origin of some of the apparent anomalies of the Elizabethan idiom is to be sought for farther back, in the earlier state of the native speech, and that, in fact, though English had by Shakespeare's time shaken off most of its 66 once abundant inflections, and was ready to shake off such as remained, yet the old grammar survived in certain strong radical mechanisms, to which all the new matter of the composite and still growing vocabulary had to adjust itself, and also in a lingering habit, or blind occasional trick, of inflections that had been forgotten. He calls attention to the wealth and variety of matter with which, in the age of Elizabeth, this apparatus of speech, and the English mind that owned it, had to deal. There were not only the hereditary notions, and those already imported and represented in the Romance and other additions to the old native vocabulary; there were also the new thoughts and feelings. bred by the energetic inquiries, actions, and discoveries of the age itself. Especially, there was an influx of new knowledge, including new ideas and speculations about language itself, and about scholarship and literary taste, from those classical studies which had been recently revived, and from the translations of Latin and Greek authors which had become common. Here was certainly a vast strain upon the grammatical apparatus; and some of the effects can be marked. What of the influence of classical studies in particular? Mr. Abbott is of opinion that it was confined mainly "to single words and to the rhythm of the sentence," and that the syntax remained English. In saying this, however, he recognises within the word "English" a certain spirited power of the English writers of the Elizabethan time to make syntax bend to their whim or will. Hence anomalies in the Elizabethan style, especially redundancies and ellipses, that cannot be otherwise accounted for. "Clearness," says Mr. Abbott, "was preferred to gram"matical correctness, and brevity both to correctness and clearness. "Hence it was common to place words in the order in which they came "uppermost in the mind, without much regard to syntax; and the "result was a forcible and perfectly unambiguous, but ungrammatical, "sentence." For the rest, though Mr. Abbott admits that the regularizing of the English syntax and idiom which has gone on from Elizabeth's time to this has been a natural process, determined by that law of specialization of function or division of labour which holds among words as among other things, and one form of which is the passing of the real and literal into the merely algebraic and symbolic, he yet regrets some of the results. "For freedom, for brevity, and for vigour," he says, "Elizabethan is superior to modern English "; and, after recapitulating his previous observations, and adding, as yet one other influence in the formation of the Elizabethan book-English, a certain humoursome deference of the popular writers to the spoken idiom round them, with its colloquialisms and rapid contractions, he concludes that all causes together "combined to give a liveliness and wakefulness to Shake"spearian English which are wanting in the grammatical monotony of "the present day." This general conclusion may be disputed. Take Shakespeare away, and there have certainly been English writers of the present century as |