Here _private_ and _personal_ may be taken as giving us two aspects of the individual; _rule_ and _example_ differ as abstract and concrete; _detecting_ and _convincing_ (the latter apparently in the older sense of “overcoming”) denote two stages of a process; _truth_ and _his country’s peace_ may be taken to express the metaphysical and the embodied forms of the same thing; _voluble_ and _smart_ seem to refer to what is perceivable by the senses and by the intellect respectively; _long usurpation_ and _convicted pseudepiscopy_ differ as simple action and action which has been judged: _God_ and _man_ bring together the divine and the human; _explode_ and _hiss out of the land_ again express two stages of a process. In the manner here indicated, these collocations serve to give the style a wonderful richness of thought. The reader feels that he is being shown both the _esse_ and the _potesse_ of the object named. At least, he gets a look at its manifold nature. The way in which Milton fills out the subject for his reader is at once lavish and perspicuous. Just as his figures were seen to have a prolonged correspondence, beyond what the casual or unthinking writer would bring to view, so his substantives and predicates are assembled upon a principle of penetration or depth of description. Our general impression of Milton—an impression we get in some degree of all the great writers of his period and of the Elizabethan period before it—is that his thought dominates the medium. While the distinction between what is said and the form of saying it can never be drawn absolutely, it is yet to be remarked that some writers seem to compose with an awareness of how their matter will look upon the page, or how it will sound in the parlor; others seem to keep their main attention upon currently preferred terms and idioms. Again, some writers seem to accept the risk of suspension, transposition, and involution out of conscious elegance; Milton seems rather to require them out of strength of purpose. He was not a writer of writing, but consistently a writer of substance, and the language was his instrumentality, which he used with the familiar boldness of a master. One would go far to find a better illustration of the saying of John Peale Bishop that the English language is like a woman; it is most likely to yield after one has shown it a little violence. All of the great prose writers of the Elizabethan age and the Seventeenth century were perfectly capable of showing it that violence, and I believe this is the true reason that a lover of eloquence today reacts their works with irrepressible admiration. The tremendous suspensions and ramifications they were willing to create; their readiness to make function the test of grammar and to coin according to need, through all of which a rational, though not always a formal or codified syntax survives—these things bespeak a sort of magisterial