It is curious how Milton's early poems have changed places in favor with _Paradise Lost_. They were neglected for over a century. Joseph Warton testifies in 1756 that they had only "very lately met with a suitable regard"; had lain "in a sort of obscurity, the private enjoyment of a few curious readers." And Dr. Johnson exclaims: "Surely no man could have fancied that he read _Lycidas_ with pleasure, had he not known its author." There can be little doubt that now-a-days Milton's juvenilia are more read than _Paradise Lost_, and by many--perhaps by a majority of readers--rated higher. In this opinion I do not share. _Paradise Lost_ seems to me not only greater work, more important, than the minor pieces, but better poetry, richer and perfecter. Yet one quality these early poems have which _Paradise Lost_ has not--charm. Milton's epic astonishes, moves, delights, but it does not fascinate. The youthful Milton was sensitive to many attractions which he afterwards came to look upon with stern disapproval. He went to the theatre and praised the comedies of Shakspere and Jonson; he loved the romances of chivalry and fairy tales; he had no objection to dancing, ale drinking, the music of the fiddle and rural sports; he writes to Diodati of the pretty girls on the London streets; he celebrates the Catholic and Gothic elegancies of English church architecture and ritual, the cloister's pale, the organ music and full voiced choir, the high embowed roof, and the storied windows which his military friends were soon to smash at Ely, Salisbury, Canterbury, Lichfield, as popish idolatries. But in _Iconoclastes_ we find him sneering at the king for keeping a copy of Shakspere in his closet. In his treatise _Of Reformation_ he denounces the prelates for "embezzling the treasury of the church on painted and gilded walls of temples, wherein God hath testified to have no delight." Evidently the Anglican service was one of those "gay religions, rich with pomp and gold" to which he alludes in _Paradise Lost_. A chorus commends Samson the Nazarene for drinking nothing but water. Modern tragedies are condemned for "mixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons"--as Shakspere does. In _Paradise Lost_ the poet speaks with contempt of the romances whose "chief mastery" it was --to dissect, With long and tedious havoc, fabled knights In battles feigned." And in _Paradise Regained_ he even disparages his beloved classics, preferring the psalms of David, the Hebrew prophecies and the Mosaic law, to the poets, philosophers and orators of Athens.