The style of his prose works is a style formed upon oratorical models. The long winding sentence, propped on epithets and festooned with digressions, was the habitual vehicle of his meaning. The effect it produces at its best was well described by Marvell, who, in a letter to Milton thanking him for a copy of the _Defence of the People of England_, remarks: "When I consider how equally it turns and rises with so many figures, it seems to me a Trajan's column, in whose winding ascent we see embossed the several monuments of your learned victories." The clink of the rhyming couplet was not more displeasing to Milton's ear than the continued emphatic bark of a series of short sentences. Accustomed as he was to the heavy-armed processional manner of scholarly Renaissance prose, he felt it an indignity to "lie at the mercy of a coy, flirting style; to be girded with frumps and curtal jibes, by one who makes sentences by the statute, as if all above three inches long were confiscate." Later on in the _Apology_ he returns to this grievance, and describes how his adversary "sobs me out half a dozen phthisical mottoes, wherever he had them, hopping short in the measure of convulsion fits; in which labour the agony of his wit having escaped narrowly, instead of well-sized periods, he greets us with a quantity of thumb-ring posies." The men of the Renaissance despised the homely savour of the native English syntax with its rude rhetoric and abrupt logic and its lore of popular adages and maxims; they had learned to taste a subtler pleasure in the progressive undulations of a long mobile sentence, rising and falling alternately, reaching the limit of its height towards the middle, and at the close either dying away or breaking in a sudden crash of unexpected downward emphasis. This is the sentence preferred by Milton, and, where haste or zeal does not interfere with the leisurely ordering, handled by him with excellent skill. At its best and at its worst alike his prose is the prose of a poet. His sentences rarely conform to any strict periodic model; each idea, as it occurs to him, brings with it a train of variation and enrichment, which, by the time the sentence closes, is often found in sole possession. The architecture depends on melody rather than on logic. The emphasis and burden of the thought generally hangs on the epithets, descriptive terms, and phrases, which he strengthens by arranging them in pairs, after a fashion much practised by poets. Thus, to take a few examples from the Divorce pamphlets, a wife, who should be "an intimate and speaking help," "a ready and reviving associate," to comfort "the misinformed and wearied life of man" with "a sweet and gladsome society," is too often "a mute and spiritless mate," united to her husband in "a disconsolate and unenjoined matrimony," whereby the blessing that was expected with her is changed "into a familiar and coinhabiting mischief, at least into a drooping and