beginning, they certainly would not have gone to that modest residence in the same street where the son of the Puritanic scrivener, then preparing for College, was busy over his books. Nay, if Ben Jonson, the last twenty-nine years of whose life coincided with the first twenty-nine of Milton's, had followed the young student from the house where he was born in Bread Street to his rooms at Cambridge, and had there become acquainted with him and looked over his early poetical exercises, it is probable enough that, while praising them so far, he would have constituted himself the organ of that very opinion as to the requisites of the poetical character which we are now discussing, and declared, in some strong phrase or other, that the youth would have been all the more hopeful as a poet if he had had a little more of the _bon vivant_ in his constitution. This, then, is a point of no little importance, involving as it does the relations of Milton as a poet to the age in which he lived, that splendid age of Puritan mastery in England which came between the age of Shakespeare and Elizabeth and the age of Dryden and the second Charles. Milton was _the_ poet of that intermediate era; that his character was such as we have described it made him only the more truly a representative of all that was then deepest in English society; and, in inquiring, therefore, in what manner Milton's austerity as a man affected his art as a poet, we are, at the same time, investigating the _rationale_ of that remarkable fact in the history of English literature, the interpolation of so original and isolated a development as the Miltonic poems between the inventive luxuriousness of the Elizabethan epoch and the witty licentiousness that followed the Restoration.