If the original genius of a poet is to be sworn away at this rate, there will soon come a time when no man is secure. Both words are common in Elizabethan English; if their occurrence in a single line is to warrant a charge of plagiarism, the next step will be to make them Jonson's property, and to forbid the use of either to all but the tribe of Ben. Milton doubtless studied Jonson's works; and, if specific resemblances are both weighed and counted, a good case can be made out for the influence of Jonson's prose on the author of the _Areopagitica_. But the fact is that criticism finds itself here in a region where this minute matching of phrase with phrase is useless or misleading. Milton's early poems grew on Elizabethan soil, and drank Elizabethan air. It matters little that there are few verbal coincidences; the influence is omnipresent, easy to feel, impossible to describe in detail. From whom but the Elizabethans could he have learned to write thus?-- Fly, envious Time, till thou run out thy race: Call on the lazy leaden-stepping Hours, Whose speed is but the heavy plummet's pace; And glut thyself with what thy womb devours. The Elizabethan style is not to be mistaken, the high-figured phrases, loosely welded together, lulling the imagination into acquiescence by the flow of the melody. Lines like these might well occur in _Richard II_. The same Shakespearian note is clearly audible in such a passage as this, where Comus describes the two brothers:-- Their port was more than human, as they stood. I took it for a faery vision Of some gay creatures of the element, That in the colours of the rainbow live, And play i' the plighted clouds. I was awe-strook, And, as I passed, I worshipped. If those you seek, It were a journey like the path to Heaven To help you find them. This has all the technical marks of late Elizabethan dramatic blank verse: "vision" as a trisyllable; the redundant syllable in the middle of the line; the colloquial abbreviation of "in the"; not to mention the fanciful vein of the whole passage, which might lead any one unacquainted with Milton to look for this quotation among the dramas of the prime. The great hyperbolical strain of the Elizabethans, which so often broke into rant, is caught and nobly echoed in praise of virtue:-- If this fail, The pillared firmament is rottenness And earth's base built on stubble. Or, to take a last example of Milton's earlier style, this description of the Lady's singing is in marked contrast to the later matured manner:-- At last a soft and solemn-breathing sound Rose like a steam of rich distilled perfumes, And stole upon the air, that even Silence Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might Deny her nature, and be never more Still to be so displaced. I was all ear, And took in strains that might create a soul Under the ribs of Death.