2. Gayley's Classic Myths. 4. Anthon's Classical Dictionary. 5. Smith's Classical Dictionary. 6. Harper's Classical Dictionary. B. Biblical 1. Cruden's Concordance. 2. Smith's Bible Dictionary. V. Poetical: A. Tennyson's Sonnet, entitled "Milton." B. Dryden's Under the Portrait of Milton. C. Keats's On Seeing a Lock of Milton's Hair. D. Longfellow's Sonnet on Milton. E. Wordsworth's Sonnet, "Milton, Thou Should'st be Living at this Hour." F. Andrew Marvell's The Rehearsal Transposed. G. Gray's The Progress of Poesy, iii. 2. H. Pupils should find others in some library. For con- VI. Histories of English Literature : A. The best of these are familiar to every teacher of Eng lish. B. The pupils in cities having libraries can examine library catalogue under "Literature, English," and "Milton," for other references than those given by the teacher. MILTON'S PREFACE THE VERSE THE measure is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Vergil in Latin; rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially, but the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame meter; graced, indeed, since by the use of some famous modern poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse, than else they would have expressed them. Not without cause, therefore, some, both Italian and Spanish poets of prime note, have rejected rime, both in longer and shorter works, as have also long since our best English tragedies, as a thing of itself, to all judicious ears, trivial and of no true musical delight; which consists only in apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another; not in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in poetry and all good oratory. This neglect, then, of rime, so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of riming. |