Here, at last, therefore, we have Milton's own judgment on the matter of our inquiry. He had speculated himself on that subject; he had made it a matter of conscious investigation what kind of moral tone and career would best fit a man to be a poet, on the one hand, or would be most likely to frustrate his hopes of writing well, on the other; and his conclusion, as we see, was dead against the "wild oats" theory. Had Ben Jonson, according to our previous fancy, proffered him, out of kindly interest, a touch of that theory, while criticising his juvenile poems, and telling him how he might learn to write better, there would have descended on the lecturer, as sure as fate, a rebuke, though from young lips, that would have made his strong face blush. "_He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things ought himself to be a true poem_:" fancy that sentence, an early and often pronounced formula of Milton's, as we may be sure it was, hurled some evening, could time and chance have permitted it, into the midst of the assembled Elizabethan wits at the Mermaid! What interruption of the jollity, what mingled uneasiness and resentment, what turning of faces towards the new speaker, what forced laughter to conceal consternation! Only Shakespeare, one thinks, had he been present, would have fixed on the bold youth a mild and approving eye, would have looked round the room thoroughly to observe the whole scene, and, remembering some passages in his own life, would mayhap have had his own thoughts! Certainly, at least, the essence of that wonderful and special development of the literary genius of England which came between the Elizabethan epoch and the epoch of the Restoration, and which was represented and consummated in Milton himself, consisted in the fact that then there was a temporary protest, and by a man able to make it good, against the theory of "wild oats," current before and current since. The nearest poet to Milton in this respect, since Milton's time, has undoubtedly been Wordsworth. DRYDEN, AND THE LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION. DRYDEN, AND THE LITERATURE OF THE RESTORATION.[6]