Milton does not seem to have any
notion of what a period means. He begins anywhere, and leaves off, not
when the sense closes, but when he is out of breath. We might have
thought this pell-mell huddle of his words was explained, if not
excused, by the exigencies of the party pamphlet, which cannot wait.
But the same asyntactle disorder is equally found in the _History of
Britain_, which he had in hand for forty years. Nor is it only the
Miltonic sentence which is incoherent; the whole arrangement of his
topics is equally loose, disjointed, and desultory. His inspiration
comes from impulse. Had he stayed to chastise his emotional writing by
reason and the laws of logic, he would have deprived himself of the
sources of his strength.
These serious faults are balanced by virtues of another kind. Putting
Bacon aside, the condensed force and poignant brevity of whose
aphoristic wisdom has no parallel in English, there is no other
prosaist who possesses anything like Milton's command over the
resources of our language. Milton cannot match the musical harmony and
exactly balanced periods of his predecessor Hooker.
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