But the indirect knowledge of earlier poets, such for example as the stray citation by Shakespeare of the words of Eteocles from Gascoigne’s play, are as nothing when we come to Milton, who shows himself transfused not only with Greek epic, but with the Greek drama. And from Milton, as the great master, comes that perfection of poetic style and of metre which has moulded all English poetry from his time onward. Matthew Arnold even speaks of him as standing above all his successors in this unique distinction. But when Arnold compares this excellence with that of Virgil, he should have added that Virgil also owed it to the Greeks. Nor do I find in Virgil’s _Æneid_ anything like the familiarity with Greek tragedy which I find in Milton. Thus the whole situation at the opening of _Paradise Lost_ is not due to Homer, but rather to the _Prometheus Vinctus_ of Æschylus, where the Titan, overcome and chained to Mt. Caucasus by the superior might of Zeus, nevertheless proclaims his undaunted spirit; and of course this struggle between gods and Titans, which appears so frequently in Greek mythology, and hence in Greek poetry, is constantly present to Milton, and suggests to him simile and metaphor all through his poem. But why delay over these desultory allusions mixed with those of other legendary cycles, all grasped by his vast erudition? Consider the _Samson Agonistes_. Here we have the poet deliberately going back to strictly Greek form and even, in his notable preface to the play, defending dramatic poetry against Puritan objections by appealing to Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, “the three tragic poets,” he says, “unequalled yet by any, and the best rule to all who endeavour to write tragedy.” You wonder when you consider that he had Shakespeare before him, whom he mentions elsewhere with admiration. But the same preface tells us clearly why he would not concede to Shakespeare’s tragedy the rank he gives to the Greek masters. He says tragedy had fallen into “low esteem or rather infamy, happening through the poet’s error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar characters, which by all judicious persons has been counted absurd.” He took therefore exactly the view of Voltaire, who is shocked at the gravedigger in _Hamlet_, and the drunken porter in _Macbeth_. Such was also the view of Milton’s great French contemporary Racine, who believed that he had composed his plays in the strictest accordance with the principles of the ancients. And yet the school of Shakespeare might easily have defended themselves by citing the practice of those very masters, whose example they were recommended to follow. In the first place every Greek tragic poet composed a merry afterlude, called from its official chorus of Satyrs, a Satyric drama, and this followed immediately upon their tragedy. Secondly, even in this, the greatest master, Æschylus, does not disdain to bring “vulgar and trivial