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When we find Milton writing: "And long it was not after,
when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he, who would not be
frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought
himself to be a true poem,"[102]--we pronounce that such a prose has its
own grandeur, but that it is obsolete and inconvenient. But when we find
Dryden telling us: "What Virgil wrote in the vigor of his age, in plenty
and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years;
struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius,
liable to be misconstrued in all I write,"[103]--then we exclaim that
here at last we have the true English prose, a prose such as we would
all gladly use if we only knew how. Yet Dryden was Milton's
contemporary.
But after the Restoration the time had come when our nation felt the
imperious need of a fit prose. So, too, the time had likewise come when
our nation felt the imperious need of freeing itself from the absorbing
preoccupation which religion in the Puritan age had exercised.


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