The slight stress and pause needed after each word, to render the full meaning, produce, when the words are short as well as emphatic, a line of terrific weight and impact. What more heartbreaking effect of weariness and eternity of effort could be produced in a single line than this, descriptive of the dolorous march of the fallen angels?-- O'er many a frozen, many a fiery Alp, Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death. It would be difficult to match this line. In _The Tears of Peace_, Chapman has a line (he repeats it in the _Tragedy of Biron_) which owes some of its strength to the same cause. He describes the body as-- This glass of air, broken with less than breath, This slave, bound face to face to death till death. The eight stresses give the line a passionate energy. All superfluous graces are usually discarded by Milton. He steers right onward, and gives the reader no rest. A French critic of that age, who has already been mentioned as the author of _Clovis_, praises Malherbe and Voiture and the worthies of their time, at the expense of the ancients. He calls Homer, especially, "a tattler, who is incessantly repeating the same things in the same idle ridiculous epithets,--_the swift-footed Achilles, the ox-eyed Juno, far-darting Apollo_." Milton felt none of this contempt for Homer, but he discarded the practice. His epithets are chosen to perform one exploit, and are dismissed when it is accomplished. As with single epithets, so with lines and phrases; he does not employ conventional repetitions either for their lyrical value or for wafting the story on to the next point of interest. He seeks no effects such as Marlowe obtained by the lyrical repetition of the line:-- To entertain divine Zenocrate. He arrests the attention at every word; and when the thing is once said, he has done with it. In his _Discourse of Satire_ Dryden raises an interesting point. He makes mention of "the beautiful turns of words and thoughts, which are as requisite in this, as in heroick poetry itself, of which the satire is undoubtedly a species." His attention, he says, was first called to these by Sir George Mackenzie, who repeated many of them from Waller and Denham. Thereupon he searched other authors, Cowley, Davenant, and Milton, to find further examples of them; but in vain. At last he had recourse to Spenser, "and there I met with that which I had been looking for so long in vain. Spenser had studied Virgil to as much advantage as Milton had done Homer; and amongst the rest of his excellencies had copied that."